In the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, knowing one’s viral status allowed the public to take proper health precautions, get access to treatment, and provided the government with needed data to understand what was happening so steps could be taken to help contain the spread. COVID-19 helped to make testing feel like second nature and led people to feel that they were doing their part for not only their personal health but also their families and society at large. While we settle into having COVID-19 as an ongoing part of life, we have been fundamentally transformed when it comes to testing. When every cough, sneeze, or sniffle sends the individual into a panic and those around them shying away, people are going to want to know – do I have COVID? SARS-CoV-2 has been such a focus for people, that they could potentially have a lack of knowledge on the impact of other respiratory viruses. If people feel sick, they take a home COVID test and if it's negative, they might assume that they have a clean bill of health and don’t look to find additional information about what could be happening with their health. Getting individuals to understand there is more than COVID-19 and getting tested for other respiratory viruses is paramount to saving lives.
Many might anticipate a comeback of the flu after it’s been relatively quiet the past few years. Can we learn something about the power and ease of testing and leverage the infrastructure put in place to better manage and treat flu and other respiratory infections? During the pandemic, governments, hospitals, clinics, testing laboratories, and organizations like Thermo Fisher Scientific helped to make sure that tests were readily available to the people that needed them. Without their consistent efforts, more lives could have been impacted due to infection. One step taken by organizations like Thermo Fisher is the creation of respiratory testing assays that not only tell people they have a virus, but what specific virus they have, like SARS-CoV-2, Flu A or B, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and more. These tests, run on the current infrastructure of real-time PCR machines built before COVID and further increased during the pandemic, require minimal additional work by the labs and takes the guesswork out of proper management.
To make things truly effective, communicators and public health officials need to be able to clearly lay out the risk of these other diseases, so individuals take them more seriously when seeking care. Flu, for instance, has become such a normalized occurrence, that many don’t bother to get their annual vaccination1, despite the fact that it kills hundreds of thousands every year around the world2. SARS-CoV-2 was a new virus when it first emerged on the world stage, which forced everybody to take it seriously as they learned more of its potential impact. A similar level of understanding needs to be implemented for these other infections. Clinicians and manufacturers can provide more education around the impact of respiratory disease, tying back key learnings that most of the general population took from their experiences with COVID-19.
The pandemic has provided enhanced testing infrastructure on real-time PCR instruments that can now be used to springboard into more readily accessible infectious disease diagnostics and save lives. The industry has a unique opportunity, if not a responsibility, to use the heightened awareness and personal responsibility also ushered in as a result of COVID-19 to provide tests that can detect a myriad of diseases, to make sure more are treated as seriously as SARS-CoV-2 rightfully was. Companies like Thermo Fisher are helping lead the way by spearheading this transition and making tests even more accessible, helping create the chance to detect and treat a respiratory outbreak the moment it’s discovered, rather than allow thousands more lives to be needlessly impacted by diseases that can be just as destructive to communities around the United States as COVID was.
1 https://newsroom.heart.org/news/despite-risks-60-of-americans-say-they-may-delay-or-skip-the-flu-shot-thisyear
2 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6815659/