rapid testing kit

It became clear early in the pandemic that tracing and testing was very much hampered by the need to send tests away to a lab for processing.  Results might not come back for a couple of days, by which time the person tested might have been walking around as an infectious carrier of the virus for all that time.  And so the search began for a rapid testing kit, something simple and inexpensive that did not require technicians and laboratories. A test that could be carried out in a person’s home and tell them instantly whether they were positive or not.

 This took some time. Even when a test kit had been developed, it needed to be established that it had a very high success rate. Something that was right two out of three times was worse than useless. And it needed to be approved by the authorities as a safe and effective test.  So it is only at this stage of the pandemic that we are starting to see the rapid testing kit being added to the toolbag of the medical teams involved.