Let us test for COVID-19 at home

This test could change everything about how we handle the pandemic — if only the FDA would let us normal people use it

The BD Veritor system.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock, BD)

One of the great frustrations of the coronavirus era is that most discrete acts of social distancing are objectively pointless. At any given moment, even if you live somewhere cases are spiking, you are probably not transmitting the coronavirus. Yet you don't know that — asymptomatic infection is not only possible but common — so you act as if you are contagious all the time.

But what if you could know? That's the possibility raised by the launch of a new antigen test from a New Jersey company, Becton Dickinson (BD), which announced Monday that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had granted emergency approval for facilities like pharmacies and doctors' offices to offer this quick screening. The BD test is easy, cheap, fast, and accurate. It could change everything about how we handle this pandemic. It could re-open schools, churches, and restaurants and allow us to visit elderly family with minimal concern.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.