Anyone know what mechanism this test uses? I didn't see it in a skim of the article.
Saying this because viral load seems to be peaking in the upper respiratory on _day one_ of symptoms, and quickly decreasing from there as it moves to the lungs.
But maybe if this is an antibody test, that won't matter?
The decisive absence of this information in the article leads me to assume that it has all the same properties (and reagent demands) as existing PCR tests, just aimed at a simpler sample acquisition process. If there were further advantages they surely would have written about them. Perhaps the RNA signatures the test is looking for are shorter or something like that, to tune the test sensitivity, but I could just as well imagine that it's purely a paperwork difference. Wasting test capacity on samples acquired in a non-approved way would be reckless when done at grassroots level, but if the manufacturer can clear a relaxed sampling process it can be a valuable improvement.
Paperwork-heavy engineering disciplines are full of examples where the exact same hardware got re-rated to higher performance levels once the necessary experience was accumulated. It's not necessarily a bad thing.
Saying this because viral load seems to be peaking in the upper respiratory on _day one_ of symptoms, and quickly decreasing from there as it moves to the lungs.
But maybe if this is an antibody test, that won't matter?