The food and Drug Administration has granted the first emergency use authorization to diagnostic healthcare company quidel Corp.. For the first covid-19 test, the agency announced. The test can quickly detect the coronavirus, but are generally considered less accurate than other types of tests that search out the virus.
covid-19 tests for covid-19 are akin to rapid flu or strep tests. This test can be run in a lab or in a doctor’s office, and only takes about 15 minutes.
The tests typically used to diagnose covid-19 search out the genetic sequence of the coronavirus in a swab collected from a patient’s nose or throat. If the test says a patient sample is positive, it’s likely to be correct. quidel’s test has a high rate of false negatives: it only identifies patient samples that contain the coronavirus 85 percent of the time.
The FDA says negative results from an immune test should be confirmed with a PCR test. The drug says the results should be shown with PCR tests.