President Trump and Vice-President Pence are receiving daily COVID-19 tests — but the nasal-swab device being used has been criticized for high levels of uncertainty
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As the Trump administration emphasizes the safety of reopening in warmer — or at least redder — areas of the country, new regulations are being implemented at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to help stamp out the small coronavirus outbreak at the White House. Alongside contact tracing and the mandatory use of masks for everyone but Trump, the most crucial aspect of the effort to keep the pandemic out of the president’s workplace has been the ramping up of testing.
Already, Dr. Francis Collins, director for the National Institutes of Health, has warned that the Abbott ID NOW device used by the White House has a false-negative rate of around 15 percent.
Though the president has touted the efficacy of the test on the White House lawn — displaying the device as if in a showroom and calling its entrance into the market a “whole new ball game” — its accuracy has been questioned before. Last month, when researchers warned the company of its high false-negative testing rates, Abbott advised them to stop storing samples in a liquid known as transport media so that the tests would not be diluted.
If the research by NYU is confirmed, the high false-negative rate would cast doubt on the security of the White House’s attempts to keep the virus out and reveal another layer of difficulty in the attempt to reopen the country safely. And with 1.8 million ID NOW devices distributed, it is one of several machines on the market that have had problems with high false-negative rates.
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