Dr. Michael Mina’s rapid test theory

The US could have prevented the surge of COVID-19 cases this winter that killed hundreds of thousands of people if only the FDA had approved methods for at-home rapid testing and made the tests widely available. That is the argument made by Dr. Michael Mina, assistant professor of epidemiology at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, one of the country’s strongest proponents for the use of at-home rapid COVID-19 tests. “Had the regulatory barriers been broken down in the summer last year, and the companies that could produce these were actually allowed to produce them at scale…we could have seen the surges of the fall and winter that happened and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, those could have largely been prevented,” Mina said on The Codcast.