The FDA recommends 3 home tests if you're exposed to COVID to boost accuracy

August 11, 20225:46 PM ET

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON — If you were exposed to COVID-19, take three home tests instead of two to make sure you're not infected, according to new U.S. recommendations released Thursday.

Previously, the Food and Drug Administration had advised taking two rapid antigen tests over two or three days to rule out infection. But the agency says new studies suggest that protocol can miss too many infections, and could result in people spreading the coronavirus to others, especially if they don't develop symptoms.

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The new guidance applies to people without symptoms who think they may have been exposed. People with symptoms can continue using two tests spaced 48 hours apart.

Thursday's update reflects the evolving understanding of the accuracy of antigen tests, which are less sensitive than laboratory tests but have become the standard testing approach due to their speed and convenience. Instead of detecting the coronavirus itself, they detect protein traces, known as antigens, similar to rapid flu tests.

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Health officials have repeatedly cautioned that the tests can give false negatives if taken too early. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people without symptoms wait five days after an exposure. That's because it generally takes several days before the antigens reach levels detectable via testing with a nose swab.

All 22 home antigen tests on the U.S. market were authorized for emergency use based on preliminary data, while companies and researchers gathered more definitive metrics on their accuracy.

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The FDA said its latest decision reflects new information on the accuracy of antigen tests. In a government study, adding a third test improved accuracy from 62% to 79%.

CORONAVIRUS UPDATES

The United States reported nearly 1,500 coronavirus deaths on Wednesday, the highest number of covid-19 fatalities in one day since mid-May. 

The country has now seen its seven-day average of newly reported deaths remain above 1,000 for 17 consecutive days. 

The Labor Department announced Thursday that about 960,000 workers filed for unemployment insurance last week. 

This is the first time that initial claims dipped below 1 million since March, but it’s also still more than the pre-pandemic record of 695,000, which had been set during the 1982 recession. All told, more than 28 million people are currently receiving some form of unemployment benefits.

The F.D.A. gives emergency approval for a new spit test as U.S. testing stalls.

With the United States facing an alarming drop in coronavirus testing that threatens to undermine national monitoring efforts, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for a new saliva-based test to detect the virus.

The new test, SalivaDirect, was developed by researchers at Yale University with some of the funding coming from the N.B.A. and the National Basketball Players Association, the university announced on Saturday in a news release. The method, it said, was being further validated through testing of asymptomatic N.B.A. players and staff members.

SalivaDirect is not the first test of its kind to secure the F.D.A.’s backing — a lab affiliated with Rutgers University received emergency authorization in May for a similar test.

Public health officials have argued for months that to get a handle on the pandemic, the United States still needs to increase overall testing, perhaps up to four million people daily, including many who are asymptomatic. But reported daily tests have trended downward for much of August and testing shortages have remained pervasive in many states.

According to the release, the researchers said they developed the test with affordability in mind, looking for ways to cut costs such as by eliminating the need for expensive collection tubes. They said they hoped labs could administer the test for around $10 per sample, contributing another test that could help combat the recent testing slowdown.

People who recovered do not need to be tested again for three months, CDC says

In recently updated guidance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that people who have recovered from the coronavirus do not need to quarantine or seek testing for three months after they have recuperated.

The new recommendation, last updated Aug. 3, cautions that those who were previously infected should still socially distance and wear masks but says they don’t need to quarantine or be tested if they “have been in close contact” with someone who tests positive, unless they develop symptoms.

Older Children and the Coronavirus: A New report questions an earlier finding regarding transmission by older children.




A study by researchers in South Korea last month suggested that children between the ages of 10 and 19 spread the coronavirus more frequently than adults — a widely reported finding that influenced the debate about the risks of reopening schools.

But additional data from the research team now calls that conclusion into question; it’s not clear who was infecting whom. The incident underscores the need to consider the preponderance of evidence, rather than any single study, when making decisions about children’s health or education, scientists said.

Some of the household members who appeared in the initial report to have been infected by older children in fact were exposed to the virus at the same time as the children. All of them may have been infected by contacts they shared.

The disclosure does not negate the overall message of that study, experts said: Children under age 10 do not spread the virus as much as adults do, and the ability to transmit seems to increase with age.

“The most important point of the paper is that it clarifies the care with which we need to interpret individual studies, particularly of transmission of a virus where we know the dynamics are complex,” said Dr. Alasdair Munro, clinical research fellow in pediatric infectious diseases at University Hospital Southampton in Britain.

The earlier study was not intended to demonstrate transmission from children to adults, only to describe contact tracing efforts in South Korea, said Dr. Young June Choe, assistant professor of social and preventive medicine at Hallym University College of Medicine and an author of both studies.

Testing remains far below need. Number of Unemployed increases. UPDATES

The inability of the United States to provide broad diagnostic testing, widely seen as a pivotal failing in the nation’s effort to contain the virus, has been traced to the botched rollout by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the tardy response by the Food and Drug Administration and supply shortages of swabs and masks.

 

But the fragmented, poorly organized American health care system has also made it difficult for hospitals and other medical providers to quickly overcome obstacles to testing.

The picture for testing is improving, slowly. The United States is completing more than 300,000 tests a day, double the amount of a month ago, according to The Covid Tracking Project.

Still, the level of testing in the United States is orders of magnitude less than what many epidemiologists say it should be. The country should be doing at least 900,000 tests a day — and as many as 20 million — to yield an accurate picture of the outbreak, they say. The need for extensive testing is even more acute as many governors have reopened their states before the epidemic has crested. Without sufficient testing it will be hard to identify and contain new outbreaks.

Most testing is not done by public health authorities — whose labs have been chronically underfunded — but by hospital laboratories and major for-profit testing companies.

 

There have been calls for more than a decade to create a national laboratory system that could oversee a testing response in a public health crisis. An effort to create one 10 years ago withered away over time because of a lack of funding.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] Sami Adamson, a freelance scenic artist, had to wait more than two months to collect unemployment benefits from New Jersey after applying.Credit...Hannah Yoon for The New York Times[/caption]

Jobless claims reach 38.6 million in nine weeks.

Even as restrictions on businesses began lifting across the United States, another 2.4 million workers filed for jobless benefits last week, the government reported Thursday, bringing the total of new claims to more than 38 million in nine weeks.

A recent household survey from the Census Bureau suggests that the pain is widespread: Forty-seven percent of adults said they or a member of their household had lost employment income since mid-March. Nearly 40 percent expected the loss to continue over the next four weeks.

And there is increasing concern that many jobs are not coming back, even for those who consider themselves laid off temporarily.

Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who is a co-author of an analysis of the pandemic’s effects on the labor market, estimates that 42 percent of recent layoffs will result in permanent job losses. “I hate to say it, but this is going to take longer and look grimmer than we thought,” he said of the path to recovery.

Against Trump’s wishes, the push to vote by mail is growing in several states.

Mr. Trump is continuing to rail against voting by mail, which is increasingly viewed as a necessary option for voting amid a pandemic.

 

His antipathy, however, has done little so far, to slow its growth as an option in both Democratic and Republican states. Eleven of the 16 states that limit who can vote absentee have eased their election rules this spring to let anyone cast an absentee ballot in upcoming primary elections — and in some cases, in November as well. Another state, Texas, is fighting a court order to do so.

 

Four of those 11 states are mailing ballot applications to registered voters. And that doesn’t count 34 other states and the District of Columbia that already allow anyone to cast an absentee ballot, including five states in which vote-by-mail is the preferred method by law.

Part of the growth is because of the specter of people voting and getting sick amid the pandemic, as happened in Wisconsin last month. But part reflects the growth of voting by mail as an increasingly desired option even before the coronavirus. In 2016, nearly one in four voters cast absentee or mail ballots, twice the share just 16 years ago, in 2004.

Nearly one in four New Yorkers lacks adequate food, the city says.

Two months into the coronavirus pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of people out of work, nearly one in four New Yorkers needs food, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Thursday.

To address the problem, the city plans to increase to 1.5 million the number of meals it distributes each day by next week, officials said, with a million to be delivered and 500,000 available for pickup at schools.

Before the virus hit, Mr. de Blasio said, officials believed that “somewhere over a million” city residents “were food-insecure, needed food more, at some point in the year.”

As a result of the pandemic, he said, “we think that number is two million or more. So almost a doubling. That’s why we have made food such a central part of what we do in response to this crisis.”

 

The city has been expanding its food-distribution efforts for weeks and has given out 32 million meals during the crisis, the mayor said.

The mayor’s announcement came after a series of complaints about the quality and nutritional value of food delivered to some residents.

Subway ridership is up 50 percent from last month, but still far below normal.

New Yorkers are slowly beginning to return to the subway system, in another sign that Americans at the center of the global coronavirus pandemic are eager for a return to normalcy.

Subway rides are now averaging 600,000 a day, after a low of 400,000 in April, Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials said Wednesday.

Bus ridership is up too, from a low of 400,000 to some 700,000 trips a day.

The nation’s biggest mass transit system saw its ridership plummet over 90 percent, in part by government order: Only essential workers are supposed to use it, along with people who absolutely need to.

Sarah Feinberg, the interim president of the New York City Transit Authority, who oversees bus and subway service, said at the monthly MTA board meeting that these relatively modest increases in ridership make proper social distancing on public transit all but impossible.
“The goal will have to be, being absolutely vigilant about your mask use and putting as much distance from yourself and the next person as possible,” she said.
Since the statewide stay-at-home order was announced in late March for all non-essential workers, those essential workers who have had to keep taking mass transit have reported crowded subway cars and buses during rush hours.

The head of buses, Craig Cipriano, urged non-essential workers to avoid riding the buses over the Memorial Day weekend. “We can’t risk overwhelming the system. Part of keeping everyone safe for now is staying off the buses,” he said. “So please don't try to take them to the beach this weekend. We need all New Yorkers to do their part, that means staying away for now.”

The MTA has instituted measures to protect its workers, like protective plastic barriers in work places and on buses, rear door boarding for buses, and it is increasing its “temperature brigades.” Next week, it will roll out its experimental UV light treatment at a few limited locations.

Michael Cohen was released from prison amid coronavirus concerns.

Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, was released from a federal prison on Thursday on furlough and returned to his home in Manhattan, one of his lawyers said. He had asked to be released over health concerns tied to the coronavirus.

Mr. Cohen, 53, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations and other crimes, had been serving his sentence at a minimum-security camp about 75 miles northwest of New York City.

His projected release date was November 2021. A law enforcement official said it was expected that Mr. Cohen would serve the balance of his sentence under home confinement.