Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, told CNN that he recommends people report positive at-home test results to their health care provider and local health department. Receiving a professionally administered PCR test also often requires a hunt for appointments or an hours-long wait.ĭr.
Though after skyrocketing in popularity this holiday season, the swabs have quickly become scarce online and at pharmacies. The at-home tests have been lauded by public health experts as an easy and efficient way to detect the virus. “It would be a wild approximation,” Sax said. He added that tracking the number of rapid tests sold could partly solve the “information vacuum.” But not everyone who buys a kit uses it immediately. Paul Sax, a professor of medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Some antigen tests, like the BinaxNOW home test, already have an option for trained telehealth providers to proctor the test and send results to public health authorities.īut the issue is just “the latest example of the overwhelming need for better public health systems in a time of crisis,” Koh said.īecause the case count is likely higher than recorded, the proportion of hospitalizations and deaths should be smaller, too, said Dr. What is desperately needed, he added, is a way to automatically connect rapid tests with the health department, for the sake of the community and the individual. That skews the statewide positivity rate and the calculus for public health officials responsible for hospital capacity and staffing, Koh said. Chan School of Public Health, said he expects Massachusetts is substantially underreporting cases because of the discrepancy. Howard Koh, a professor at the Harvard T. But the already-high official numbers are probably undercounting actual cases, experts say, since they do not include many results from antigen tests.ĭr. Omicron has led to widespread transmission of COVID nationwide and driven up case counts to record-breaking levels in New England. (It also includes a graphic on how to self-test.)
Instructions on the website about self-testing encourage residents with positive test results to stay home for 10 days. Instead, the spokesperson said that people using at-home tests who test positive should isolate and notify their close contacts - anyone within six feet of them for 15 minutes or more.
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