Medical Testing

...  At-home rapid Covid tests — which allow you to swab your own nose and get the results in minutes — can be a useful and reassuring way for both the vaccinated and unvaccinated to navigate the ongoing pandemic.

With the availability of vaccines for all people 12 years and older in the United States, it may be hard to imagine why anyone would still need a home test for Covid-19. But the coronavirus isn’t going away anytime soon, and a rise in infections this fall among the unvaccinated appears inevitable as a new, highly-infectious variant called Delta spreads around the world.

There's mounting research to suggest that protecting people who are immuno-compromised from getting COVID is important not just for their sake – it could be critical in the effort to end the pandemic for everyone.

The evidence comes from two separate strands of studies.

Dr. Laura McCoy has been doing the first type. She's an infectious disease researcher at University College London.

"The group of people that I'm particularly interested in are those living with HIV," she says.

She's been studying how well their immune systems respond to vaccines against COVID-19 — specifically the Pfizer vaccine.

So far, it's worked quite well for HIV-positive people.

But there's a catch. In her studies, "all of our participants had really quite well-controlled HIV."