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This is for good reason. Rapid tests are substantially less sensitive and often give false negatives, especially for asymptomatic cases. There are also a lot of

This is for good reason. Rapid tests are substantially less sensitive and often give false negatives, especially for asymptomatic cases. There are also a lot of rapid "at home" tests out there that have high false positive rates, so even if non-PCR tests were added to the data the only reasonable approach would be to still require them to be administered by a medical professional to make sure the test is correctly administered and that the test itself is relatively high quality.

ianhawes 5y ago
The idea that rapid tests are less sensitive and therefore not valuable is summer-2020 thinking and outdated. Rapid tests are perfectly fine and should be counted by health departments. Case in point. My family of 4 all tested positive on rapid tests. 3/4 of us had symptoms. None of us received PCR tests because the next available appointments (other than a 6 hour wait at a state run testing center) were a week away. Thats 4 people not counted. And we were part of an outbreak that included 3 other families that all tested positive via rapid tests.