The Food and Drug Administration approved a coronavirus test that will give results in less than an hour.
The test, made by Cepheid, will be rolled out on March 30. The company said the test has “a detection time of approximately 45 minutes.” Existing tests delivered results within days.
The new tool can also test patients at the bedside.
“With new tools like point-of-care diagnostics, we are moving into a new phase of testing, where tests will be much more easily accessible to Americans who need them,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement Saturday.
The test should help alleviate the backlog of testing in the United States. As of Sunday morning, the U.S. had more than 26,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker. At least 340 have died from the virus, and 176 have recovered.
