We Still Don't Have At-Home Testing For the Flu—But COVID-19 Has Changed the Stakes
conducted on at-home COVID-19 tests showed that people don’t need a medical degree to insert a swab up their nose, swirl it around, and then insert the swab in a pre-made solution and read the resulting lines. In fact, that technology is essentially the same one that doctors and nurses use in doctors’ offices, emergency rooms and health centers to test for influenza, RSV, and strep.
The reason they don’t yet has to do with a number of factors, from cultural bias to the economics of the flu-testing market. The medical community has historically been reluctant to entrust self-tests in the hands of the public because of concerns about how well the people without medical expertise can collect the samples and perform the chemical reaction required to detect the presence of a virus or bacteria.
While that may be true of the COVID-19 self tests, the self-tests for flu that are still being developed aren’t quite there yet. Doctors have relied for years on so-called point-of-care testing that provides results within minutes about whether their patients have flu, but they have also known that the false negative rate of these tests can range up to 40%. “You trade accuracy for speed,” says Dr. Lisa Maragakis, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
But COVID-19 changed that. Since COVID-19 causes similar symptoms to flu of fever, muscle aches and fatigue, doctors can no longer safely assume their patients are infected with influenza. Now, it’s important to distinguish the two infections because they have. Having self-tests for influenza as well as SARS-CoV-2 would help to differentiate them and get people started on the right medications for their respective infections more quickly.
The FDA has set strict criteria for at-home tests, and the false negative rate for rapid antigen tests for influenza has been a stumbling block. Manufacturers are trying to address that concern by offering
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