US COVID Response Has Failed By Not Scaling Up Home Testing: Harvard’s Michael Mina on Rapid Tests as Best Chance to Contain Outbreaks

This week hosts Mark Masselli and Margaret Flinter speak with Dr. Michael Mina, Epidemiologist and member of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard, where they are taking a multi-disciplinary approach to tackling the ongoing pandemic. Dr. Mina has long been a proponent of making cheap, rapid, at-home COVID tests available to all Americans as a much more effective way to curtail the pandemic’s spread, especially as tens of millions of children have returned to the classroom. He says these tests, which have been deployed successfully in other countries, are almost 100 per cent effective in identifying potential infectious ‘super-spreaders’, and that the CDC and the FDA should classify them as a public health, not a medical, tool to allow for more swift production and deployment. He also discusses their efforts to build a global surveillance system for future disease outbreaks.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Podchaser | TuneIn | RSS | More