NBA finds technological option for coronavirus testing
If you’re interested, an NBA player can now test himself for coronavirus and get the results on his cell phone in no more than 20 minutes.
And the league is convinced those tests are fast and accurate enough.
It’s a high-tech answer to the matter of waiting for test results. The NBA partnered with a company called Cue Health, which provides the league with the technology that allows virtually anyone to take a home test for COVID-19. The person introduces the swab to the nose, places it in a reader – almost the size of two sets of cards – connected wirelessly to their smartphone and obtains the result much faster than time with most of the other alternatives can deliver it .
The NBA is based on a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic to indicate that the tests are correct 97.8% of the time. Cue Health was in the process of using the flu testing technology at the time the pandemic began, then quickly adjusted when it became clear that the fight against coronavirus would be global.
“We were in the clinical studies stage when COVID struck,” explained Cue CEO and co-founder Ayub Khattak. “It was a very quick transition for us because the platform is really modular, so testing for COVID-19 was relatively routine for us.”
In some cases, testing by the NBA last season forced teams and players to wait for results for hours.
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