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Encouraged by the development of rapid at-home coronavirus tests, medtech companies are now betting on the potential to sell over-the-counter and direct-to-consumer diagnostics for diseases beyond COVID-19.
The pandemic has enabled consumers to get tested for the virus in the privacy of their homes, a convenience that companies like Abbott Laboratories and Quest Diagnostics are hoping will appeal to people when it comes to other diagnostics.
Home testing was already rising worldwide, as consumers take a more proactive role in their healthcare. COVID-19 is likely speeding that shift, analysts and companies say. Home testing and home collection will fundamentally reshape the diagnostics industry and healthcare in general by providing more testing options, said William Blair analysts, who contend that OTC tests will be one of the key long-term impacts of the pandemic on the industry.
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With rapid antigen tests for SARS-CoV-2 slow to come to market, officials at the US Food and Drug Administration have tried to signal via a number of public comments that the agency would be flexible regarding test performance requirements and use models.
These indications of flexibility have largely failed to speed development and commercialization of rapid antigen tests, however, as test vendors, wary of falling short of agency requirements, have instead stuck to the more stringent specifications presented in the FDA s test templates.
Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, rapid antigen tests were identified as a potentially key technology for slowing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 with calls for these tests growing as it became evident that molecular test capacity was not able to keep up with demand and was unlikely to ever reach a level where regular testing at population scale would be possible.
Dr. Anthony Fauci sees sobering data on South Africa variant; US daily cases below 100K, but danger lurks: Latest COVID-19 updates Grace Hauck and John Bacon, USA TODAY
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Data on the South Africa variant of the coronavirus is sobering, and current vaccines are less effective against it than the original strain or U.K. variant, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday.
Fauci, speaking on NBC s Meet the Press, said less is known about the South African variant than the U.K. version, which has proved to be more transmissible than the original version of the virus.