Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
What's interesting to me is there was a lot of opposition to rapid testing earlier on in the pandemic when it would have been more useful. Regulators were slow to allow them and a lot of people were convinced they would be harmful, often due to dubious reasoning about sensitivity relative to PCR and total ignorance of costs and other trade-offs, as usual ("we can't allow a 95% accurate test when we could do a 99% test, and let's not worry if people can or will actually do the 99% test that costs 50x more and has 200x the turnaround time"). Doctors and regulators have a not-so-great history in this area, fighting against people being allowed to do their own pregnancy or rapid HIV tests.
What has changed? Are these tests better than before in some way? Or is this another case of the herd suddenly switching direction without any clear underlying reason?
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What's funny is that the antigen tests give more false negatives with omicron than previous variants. The reason is apparently because people become symptomatic more quickly after infection than with other variants, but the tests aren't great at detecting early infections.