Viewing post #2172923 by EscondidoCal

teacup754 said:@EscondidoCal, as a lab person can you help me understand what the difference is between the testing provided by the WHO that is apparently used in Korea and Italy where they are testing many many more than the CDC kits here in the US. For me the uncertainty of the extent of true infection rates is the scary part. It could truly be all around us now and we don't know it.

Wish I knew. I really don't know how they are testing either way.
We used rapid tests for flu that took about 20 min to run, so a STAT from the ER could be resulted in 1 hr or less.

I doubt they could develop a rapid test to ID COVID-19 this soon. Need to make sure it has low false negatives & false positives, which takes a lot of testing before being released for use.

Maybe someone else here has better info (?)