■ Some experts want to refocus U.S. testing for COVID-19 toward mass screening.

Experts feel approach can help curb infection

WASHINGTON — When a Halloween party sparked a COVID-19 outbreak at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, school officials conducted rapid screening on more than 1,000 students in a week, including many who didn’t have symptoms.

Although such asymptomatic screening isn’t approved by regulators and the 15-minute tests aren’t as sensitive as the genetic one that can take days to yield results, the testing director at the historically Black college credits the approach with quickly containing the infections and allowing the campus to remain open.

“Within the span of a week, we had crushed the spread. If we had had to stick with the PCR test, we would have been dead in the water,” said Dr. Robert Doolittle, referring to the polymerase chain reaction test that is considered the gold standard.

With President Joe Biden vowing to get elementary and middle school students back to the classroom by spring and the country’s testing system still unable to keep pace with the spread of COVID-19, some experts see an opportunity to refocus U.S. testing less on medical precision than on mass screening that they believe could save hundreds of thousands of lives. As vaccines slowly roll out, they say the nation could suppress the outbreak and reopen much of the economy by easing regulatory hurdles to allow millions more rapid tests.

“Our whole testing approach, which has failed, has tried to tackle this pandemic as though it’s a bunch of little medical problems,” said Dr. Michael Mina, a Harvard University testing specialist. “Instead, we need to take a big step back and say, ‘Wait, this isn’t a lot of medical problems, it’s an epidemic. If we resolve the epidemic, we resolve the medical problems.’ ”

The U.S. reports about 2 million tests daily, the vast majority of which are the slower, PCR variety. The initial tests developed to detect COVID-19 all used the cutting-edge technique, which quickly became the standard at U.S. hospitals and labs. It also became the benchmark for accuracy at the Food and Drug Administration, which has greenlighted more than 230 PCR tests but only about a dozen rapid tests. Priced as low as $5, the quick tests look for viral proteins, which are generally considered a less rigorous measure of infection.

The FDA said in a statement it supports “innovation in testing” and “has not hesitated” to make rapid tests available.

The case for widescale rapid testing is getting a boost from universities and school systems that have used the approach to stay open through the latest waves of the pandemic. And proponents point to apparent success stories like the small European nation of Slovakia, which saw infections drop after screening two-thirds of its roughly 5 million people with the tests.

Gerry Broome The Associated Press Medical assistants conduct coronavirus rapid testing at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, N.C. As vaccinations slowly ramp up, some experts advise relying more on rapid tests that are less accurate.