Last week, the Food and Drug Administration paved the way for commercial developers to create at-home COVID-19 tests. While no test is yet approved for home use, a fast and cheap test could encourage people to test themselves routinely before going to work or school. Real-time results would enable infected people to self-quarantine right away, keeping asymptomatic people from infecting others. "It fits with the modeling that’s been done where if you can test frequently enough that you could actually start to dampen down, if people would quarantine, you could dampen down cases. And that, as you know, would be huge," says Dr. Gregory Poland, an infectious diseases expert and head of Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group.

On the Mayo Clinic Q&A podcast, Dr. Poland discusses the science behind at-home testing for COVID-19. Dr. Poland also shares the status of vaccine research trials, including how healthy adults can enroll in the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial.
Research disclosures for Dr. Gregory Poland.