Santa Fe Standard

From December 23, 2022

This Party Season, You Don’t Have to R.S.V.P., Just Test

As rising Covid rates collide with a return to holiday festivities, hosts are coming up with inventive compromises.

Nearly 60 percent of 252 U.S. companies surveyed in October and November planned to have work parties this year, up from 27 percent in 2021 and 5 percent in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a recruiting firm.

In New York and Los Angeles, large cities where rates of Covid and other respiratory illnesses have surged, public health officials have issued ominous warnings in recent days. But they have stopped short of explicitly asking residents to change plans or to stay home, instead suggesting that people wear masks in public indoor settings or even in crowded outdoor spaces.

Many hosts who are proceeding with parties have taken another tack: They’re asking guests to take a rapid Covid test before walking in the front door.

Perhaps surprisingly, many experts endorse rapid testing as a wise strategy for holiday partyers. At-home antigen tests can detect active infections with a high degree of accuracy, even if they are far from foolproof.

Rapid tests are less sensitive than polymerase chain reaction tests, which are performed in a lab and amplify the genetic material in a sample, and so they may miss an early infection when the viral load is low.

But a positive result on a rapid test may actually be more closely “correlated with how infectious you are” than a positive result on a PCR test, said Bill Hanage, co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“The way to think about it is that it’s cumulative risk reduction,” he said, adding, “We cannot get the risk to zero, unfortunately, but we can reduce it markedly by vaccines, masks and, if people don’t want to wear masks, having them do a rapid test before getting together.”

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Original source can be found here.