Thanks for being the first pedant on this 
Yep there is no PCR here. Even of you could buy a real time PCR machine right now (they are in the 10s of thousands each, inventory is low and hospitals are getting shipment preference), RTPCR isn’t really a simple thing to set up reliably. The accuracy from a home.user would never match the accuracy of a skilled user with all the ancillary equipment and skills.
I’ll just party in furry VR with friends.
Yes even the marketing claims on these are provisoed around that.
As accurate as PCR in our clinical trials, as accurate when results are interpreted properly. And so forth. And “as accurate” seems to come about by comparison to the lowest bar of PCR tests.
There’s far too many variables at home with regards who and how for them to actually be as good as a PCR applied in a clinical setting.
And a lot of the excitement on these, and why they were developed is as a faster and potentially more cost effective test for those clinical settings. A much more reliable home test is kinda a bonus. Shouldn’t compare clinical use to home use in either case. It’s: at the hospital as good as PCR but faster. At home, all the stumbling blocks inherent to that, much better than an antigen home kits.
The small number of approved tests, and I think there are some clinical ones too, is likely because they’re very new. They just hit the timing necessary to get studies out. When I was checking into them it seems a bunch promising ones didn’t get emergency approval because they stumbled with Delta and now Omicron. Not enough data, and looked like they had trouble detecting it.
Costs are interesting.
At home PCR tests seem to run about $110-150, and they take much longer cause you have to mail them off.
Even the quite expensive Cue tests are only about $75 each. It’s the fact that they’re only sold in multipacks and by subscription, and the hub costing $250 that makes them very expensive to get into.
The detect kids are $50 a test. Either is cheaper than home PCR test kits. But a home rapid test is like $10-12
I can’t tell you what any of these costs in a proper healthcare context. But from what gather it’s a similar ranking.
With either company the intent doesn’t seem to be to replace the rapid tests for lots of regular testing. It seems to be to provide a better and more cost effect approach for organizations.
Either so they can do cost effective, more reliable testing onsite. Or for those places that regularly send a test to employees. A lot of employers have been sending employees a rapid test per week this whole time. Now they can potentially send one of these a month.
For clinical settings. From what I understand the idea is that there are both costs, and logistical delays that these can eliminate. We keep getting longer waits on PCR results whenever we have a new “wave”, crunches in available appointments. And a lot of places are collecting up the tests and shipping them to offsite labs and what have.
Running that grade of tests, in an hour, onsite. Could clear a lot of that up, and lower costs overall. The tests themselves are cheaper, if only a bit. But a lot of the logistics gets cleared away. It’s also got implications for mobile and random testing along the same lines. You can do more of it, more easily and cheaper than PCR. But get better information than antigen.
I suspect this is part of why the Cue tests are so expensive. They’ll sell it to you. But it’s not really meant to sit on your bathroom counter, where you can use it in a pinch.
You both took the words right out of my finger tips.
Am I your friend you speak of? Cause my family is now 9/10 positive tests after xmas
Usually these Point of Care (POC) tests are more labour per patient which is a cost disadvantage at scale. With batch PCR we can set up hundreds of extractions and standard PCRs at once with robust sample tracking (robots!). The PCR procedure itself actually fairly fast so what little time we lose in the assay is made up for by the parallel nature of standard PCR testing.
And yes you are correct, there are other POC rapid amplification clinic use kits out there covering lots of viruses. They are often used when the cost is justified in context of needing a rapid answer.
Re costs, Once a test gets implemented in a clinical setting the base cost of reagents is just one part of the equation. There is staff costs equipment amortization reporting and validation costs (if a physician needs to sign off the batch) These can add up quickly (base RTPCR reagents are about $10 to 15 cdn) so the cost difference of POC isn’t necessarily that big for limited use, but it adds up during large testing burdens.
(btw I work in a clinical lab in a public hospital doing test development and validation so that’s my perspective in a public health care setting results may vary in private pay)
It’s more accurate than an antigen test, but most of the isothermal tests aren’t quite as sensitive as PCR.
This may be academic, since the value is trying to determine if you may be infectious at the time of the test, and the papers I’ve read on this topic say that these types of tests are highly correlated with PCR for that use case.
I think one study said that these types of tests diverged at around 9 days from the time of infection.
I did notice the Amazon PCR tests are $40, which is cheaper than most of the other ones you can buy. No clue if this is because they are subsidizing it or what, but we got results back in just under 24 hours when we tried it.
Yeah. The video at this link looks like you could pith them while you’re in there.
I actually had a really bad fever at the beginning of december… and took a PCR test at the doctors.
What wasn’t mentioned to me was that even PCR tests have non standardly high levels of false negatives, and because I got a negative result (and didn’t read the instructions that said otherwise) I didn’t know I was supposed to take another test at the cessation of symptoms plus 5 days ANYWAY just to make sure the test stayed negative.
So, even if you code a negative test, if you’re still experiencing covid symptoms, make sure to take another test 5 days after symptoms stop so that you know whether or not you had COVID and can notify trackers/tracers.
… in America.
It’s the 2021 version of, “Want to see my etchings?”
Sure, shoot me your Insta…
(Surely you didn’t mean in person?)
(I suppose it really should be “Send me a link to google docs” but I’m trying to blend in with “You’s kids”.)
There are still some online sources of standard at-home $25 tests (e.g., DemeTECH which sells them direct) even though stores don’t have any. (And what is even the point of Wal-Mart marking them down to $15 when they won’t actually sell you one?)
$1500 doesn’t seem that expensive to test a bunch of people accurately at 20 min. each.
I’m thinking about what it would cost the school I work at to test everyone, since we’ll all be back in person on Monday…
Rapid-test and chill.
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