A startup that is less than a year old is aiming to reduce barriers to COVID-19 testing with a test that patients can do themselves with an oral swab.
“We offer an oral fluid test, so it’s just a self-collected mouth swab where you don’t have to have a medical provider stick a swab into your nose,” explained Agatha Bacelar, Vice President of Field Operations for Curative. “It’s very much like putting a Q-tip like swab into your mouth and almost brushing your teeth with it. You rub it along your teeth, your gums, the roof of your mouth and your tongue.”
Bacelar says having patients conduct the tests on themselves can noticeably reduce costs and increase efficiency, because you eliminate the need for a highly trained medical practitioner and there is no need to swap PPE between each patient.
The ease of the test may also reduce patient’s anxiety.
“Our test is painless. You stick it in your mouth and you can do it yourself, so it allows access to the test to reach much broader audiences. A test that people are afraid of doing like the nasopharyngeal test or the brain tickler is not very helpful when we talk about public health,” she said.
The test is about 90 percent accurate and has received emergency use authorization by the FDA. Under that authorization, patients are not allowed to take the test home, although the company hopes that that will come next.
Bacelar says DIY tests like this one can help make testing more routine, as opposed to early limits on testing.
“There was this encouragement that only those with symptoms or who felt that they were exposed should get tested, but I think more and more it should become part of our daily lives,” she said.
Public health experts widely agree that frequent and accurate testing could help catch outbreaks before they grow out of control.