If it were possible to make a home test kit for COVID, I think that would be helpful. By home test kit I mean an arrangement where people could order these tests by phone or from Internet and they would be mailed to them. Then the person would proceed to take a test sample according to the instructions in the kit and mail it back to the laboratory. The laboratory would test the sample and give the person the results via phone or web.
This kind of arrangement would allow people suspecting that they might have COVID to self-quarantine until they have a certainty (or near certainty since no test is perfect) whether they have the disease or not. Thus, it would lead to less people being exposed to potential early-stage COVID carriers and hinder the disease from spreading. Importantly, it would also protect the health care workers as they would have to come to contact with so many potential COVID carriers.
You might be interested in the Just One Giant Lab OpenCovid19 project. They just had their first conference call and their goal is to “develop an open source methodology to safely test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 using tools as common as possible”.
If it were possible to make a home test kit for COVID, I think that would be helpful. By home test kit I mean an arrangement where people could order these tests by phone or from Internet and they would be mailed to them. Then the person would proceed to take a test sample according to the instructions in the kit and mail it back to the laboratory. The laboratory would test the sample and give the person the results via phone or web.
This kind of arrangement would allow people suspecting that they might have COVID to self-quarantine until they have a certainty (or near certainty since no test is perfect) whether they have the disease or not. Thus, it would lead to less people being exposed to potential early-stage COVID carriers and hinder the disease from spreading. Importantly, it would also protect the health care workers as they would have to come to contact with so many potential COVID carriers.
You might be interested in the Just One Giant Lab OpenCovid19 project. They just had their first conference call and their goal is to “develop an open source methodology to safely test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 using tools as common as possible”.