COVID Tests Weren’t Designed for This
Updated at 12:44 p.m. ET on November, 23 2021
In a world with perfect coronavirus tests, people could swab their nose or spit in a tube and get near-instant answers about their SARS-CoV-2 status. The products would be free, fast, and completely reliable. Positives would immediately shuttle people out of public spaces and, if needed, into treatment; negatives could green-light entry into every store, school, and office, and spring people out of isolation with no second thought. Tests would guarantee whether someone is contagious, or merely infected, or neither. And that status would hold true until each person had the chance to test again.
Unfortunately, that is not the reality we live in—nor will it ever be. “No such test exists,” K. C. Coffey, an infectious-disease physician and diagnostics expert at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told me. Not for this virus, and “not for any disease that I know of.” And almost two years into this pandemic, imperfection isn’t the only testing problem we have. For many Americans, testing remains inaccessible, unaffordable, and still—still!—ridiculously confusing.
Contradictory results, for instance, are an all-too-common conundrum. Cole Shacochis Edwards, a nurse in Maryland, discovered at the end of August that her daughter, Alden, had been exposed to the virus while masked at volleyball practice. Shacochis Edwards rapid-tested her family of four at home, while the high school ran a
