As a third surge of the coronavirus threatens much of the United States, public health experts across the country say there still aren’t enough tests available to keep the virus under control.
Right now, some doctors and hospitals are offering rapid tests to patients, which can give results in minutes. And over the next few weeks, major pharmacy retailers like CVS and Walgreens say they’ll start offering a type of rapid test called an antigen test, which some hope will give Americans more access to testing.
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“There’s a need for testing across the board,” Gigi Kwik Gronvall, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told NBC News.
About 30 million COVID-19 tests are given every month, according to estimates from The Atlantic magazine’s COVID Tracking Project. But studies have found that the U.S. would need millions more —193 million a month, according to one report — to be effective.
