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Five-Minute Coronavirus Tests Will Aid Every Stage of the Fight

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Americans anxious about their coronavirus status and ability to get tested got excellent news over the weekend. On Saturday, medical-device giant Abbott Laboratories said it got the green light from the Food and Drug Administration to roll out a new rapid and portable Covid-19 test. It’s going to start doing so this week.

Abbott's test can detect the virus in as little as five minutes and runs on a 6.6-pound machine that is already set up in doctors offices around the country to test for strep throat and flu. That will go a long way toward fixing a key problem — a lack of adequate and available diagnostic tools — that allowed the disease to spread widely and rapidly in the U.S., which in turn helped convince President Donald Trump to extend federal social distancing guidelines through at least April 30. Current tests take hours to run and are unevenly distributed, adding to the problem, while some labs are so backed up that people are left without results for days or weeks.

Faster and widely dispersed testing should help the U.S. track the virus better and slow the spread. The speediness and portability of the platform means testing can take place in a wider variety of spaces; that will keep people safer. And while the worst of the crisis is yet to come and the U.S needs to slow infections before it can think about reopening the economy, once infection rates come down, rapid and portable testing can also hasten a recovery.

Former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb published an excellent roadmap over the weekend for how the U.S. can cautiously get back to normal. It divides the response into four categories: slowing the spread, state-by-state reopening, lifting physical distancing, and rebuilding readiness. Abbott's test isn't going to get America past any milestones on its own. But the rapid diagnostic and others like it can play a unique role at each stage.

The priorities for slowing the spread are preventing new transmission via social distancing and keeping the health system from being overwhelmed. That's hard when people line up outside of packed hospitals waiting to get tested. Once Abbott’s test is up and running, governments should work aggressively to direct people with mild symptoms or suspected exposure toward clinics, smaller physician practices, urgent-care facilities, or even pharmacies where it should be made widely available. These moves would create distance, reduce burdens on hospital workers, get individuals peace of mind and needed medical and behavioral information in minutes, while giving governments much-needed data.

Cautiously reopening the economy in states that are seeing declining cases will require substantially boosted surveillance to prevent a second wave of infections. Rapid and widely dispersed testing will be essential. Coupled with antibody testing to establish acquired immunity and stepped-up public hygiene, states and employers can work with a wide net of convenient providers to get people screened before they return to work without putting them at risk. Rapid tests will also help governments move from broad mitigation to targeted contact tracing and isolation. High-risk individuals will likely still stay isolated, and low-density strategies will remain the rule, but parts of the population could begin to live a relatively normal life. The reopening will be crucial for the economy, and responsibly doing so will help divert resources to areas that are still at the height of an outbreak.

Public health measures are all intended to buy time to build true national surveillance capability and effective treatments. Rapid diagnostics will be the backbone of tracing efforts and can identify candidates for early intervention. An optimal roll-out of these new tests will be difficult, given the fragmented nature of America’s response so far. But if the U.S. embraces the challenge, it will get both immediate relief and a quicker road out of sheltering in place.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Max Nisen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering biotech, pharma and health care. He previously wrote about management and corporate strategy for Quartz and Business Insider.

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