What the Coronavirus Variants Mean for Testing
Most tests should be able to detect the variants of concern, but test developers and health officials must remain vigilant, scientists say.
A man receives a nasal swab at a mobile Covid-19 testing site in Queens, N.Y., in early April.Credit.Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
By Emily Anthes
April 14, 2021, 3:00 p.m. ET
In January 2020, just weeks after the first Covid-19 cases emerged in China, the full genome of the new coronavirus was published online. Using this genomic sequence, scientists scrambled to design a large assortment of diagnostic tests for the virus.
But the virus has mutated since then. And as the coronavirus has evolved, so has the landscape of testing. The emergence of new variants has sparked a flurry of interest in developing tests for specific viral mutations and prompted concerns about the accuracy of some existing tests.
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