By Joshua Huff, sports editor
WASHINGTON, D.C. – A diagnostic company in California received an emergency use authorization order from the Food and Drug Administration to make available a COVID-19 test that can deliver results within an hour.
The Food and Drug Administration approved the first rapid COVID-19 test, created by Cepheid, on Saturday. This is the first test that can be used at the point of care. The tests are scheduled to be available by the end of March.
“During this time of increased demand for hospital services, clinicians urgently need an on-demand diagnostic test for real-time management of patients being evaluated for admission to health-care facilities,” Dr. David Persing, MD, Ph.D., Chief Medical and Technology Officer at Cepheid, said. “An accurate test delivered close to the patient can be transformative — and help alleviate the pressure that the emergence of the 2019-nCoV outbreak has put on healthcare facilities that need to properly allocate their respiratory isolation resources.”
Currently, testing involves a health care worker swabbing the back of a person’s nose, sending off the test to a lab and then awaiting the results, which can take days.
Cepheid’s test still involves a nasal swab, but the tests can be done in a hospital or clinic with the results available within 45 minutes.
“By leveraging the design principles of our current Xpert Xpress Flu/RSV cartridge technology, in which multiple regions of the viral genome are targeted to provide rapid detection of current and potential future variants of SARS-CoV-2, we have developed a test that provides reference lab-quality results in multiple settings where actionable treatment information is needed quickly,” Persing said.
As of Sunday morning, there were 131 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Alabama. Sixty-one of those confirmed cases are in Jefferson County and one is in St. Clair County. There are still no deaths associated with the outbreak in the state.
Nationally, there are 27,686 confirmed cases of the coronavirus with 349 deaths.