The Sky is not Falling .....Necessarily?So that no ones thinks I'm talking out of my behind ...before i say anything else I want to state that I have a degree in biiology and taught the subject for 30 years. It in no way makes me an expert but I can read the reports.
As recently as a week ago the CDC came out with an NR stating, among other things, that all those testing for Covid needed to make sure that their test could test for the variants or at the very least the potential for an increase in false negatives as a consequence of them. Essentially the greater the number of markers on the virus the test is designed to catch, the less likely the test won't work for the variants. Add to that that even a very antigen (protein) specific test could still work depending on the codon site (on the RNA) where the mutation has taken place that would ultimately lead to a change in the antigen ...and thus render the test unreliable for all variants.
What does that mean for THRM and AcuVid ....imho, nothing serious because now
every test device, authorized, approved, under review or still in the testing phase, is dealing with the same set of circumstances. Presumably the gold standard PCR tests will be fine but even companies selling those are re-testing. As far as Rapid Antigen Tests it could be argued that these will ALL need to be re-tested more rigorously.
I would suggest it's like The Turtle and the Hare ....the hare has been slowed down giving the turtle a chance to catch up. So even with all the chatter about SONA today ...they are really not much closer to the finish line than THRM in spite of optics.
www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/transmission/variant.html