Antigen tests are an effective tool to help employers prevent the spread COVID-19 in the workplace. Antigen tests, when used for screening employees in non-healthcare workplaces, can detect current infection before an employee enters the workplace or returns to work. Antigen tests are Easy to give Quick to return results Low in cost Antigen tests…
A new large scale international review of rapid Covid-19 tests finds that few of them meet the World Health Organization’s minimum acceptable performance standards. There are two kinds of rapid tests – molecular tests, including PCR, which are considered to be the gold standard of molecular diagnostics; and rapid antigen tests, which detect proteins of the virus.…
Since the start of the pandemic, schools and universities across the world have been facing a daunting challenge as they re-opened their campuses while protecting the health of students and faculty. While keeping schools open to in-person learning poses epidemic risks, keeping them closed poses educational and social-emotional risks to all students, which can have…
We are at war with a virus that is currently winning by taking two 9/11’s worth of victims every week—by Christmas it could be three. There is no question that if 1,000 Americans were dying each day in a war, we would act swiftly and decisively. Yet, we are not. This should not be about politics—it is…
The Swedish COVID-19 experiment of not implementing early and strong measures to safeguard the population has been hotly debated around the world, but at this point we can predict it is almost certain to result in a net failure in terms of death and suffering. As of Oct. 13, Sweden’s per capita death rate is 58.4 per…
ASW Reopening in August 2020 The American School of Warsaw reopened on 18 August 2020, ready to welcome students and prepared with a three-layer plan, STOP-PROTECT-REACT (Figure 1). We started the year by testing all students and staff. We were pleased to see no positive cases in that initial round of testing, and we started…
Antigen test reliably and quickly triages people suspected of SARS-CoV-2, with results ready in 15 minutes, allowing informed treatment decisions Antigen test accurately screens individuals with known exposure to infected SARS-CoV-2 patients, providing fast answers regarding their infection status Affordable and small, instrument-free testing kit enables convenient use for healthcare professionals at different point of…
Hong Kong third wave is ‘worrying’ Public health experts say the third wave of infection now hitting Hong Kong is the worst it has seen so far, and is much more worrying than an outbreak earlier this year. “This is the start of a sustained massive local outbreak that we have never seen,” said Prof…
Politicians, government officials and pharma executives alike have been predicting a COVID-19 vaccine debut by year’s end, but Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier doubts that’s possible—and Merck has enough vaccine experience to know the obstacles ahead. Instead, those who are promising vaccines later this year could be hurting the overall fight against the pandemic, Frazier figures.…
The news: We should prepare now for a potential new wave of coronavirus cases this winter, according to the UK’s Academy of Medical Sciences. Health-care systems tend to struggle in winter anyway because infectious diseases spread faster as we spend more time in poorly ventilated indoor spaces, and because conditions like asthma, heart attacks, and stroke…
