Better late than never?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued Emergency Use Authorization for a new coronavirus test that takes just 15 minutes to complete.

The test's maker, Abbott, announced the news Friday evening in a press release, saying it plans to start delivering 50,000 tests per day starting next week.

  The Hill

This could have been done by the middle of February had Trump not led the way to his administration's complacency approach. And by now, everyone could have been tested and those infected (including asymptomatic people who tested positive) could have been quarantined, controlling the spread of the virus and the overwhelming of our health system (which is in dire need of an overhaul anyway).

Abbott will run the tests on its point-of-care ID NOW platform, a portable platform that weighs less than 7 pounds and can be deployed to coronavirus hotspots. The company said it expects to produce about 5 million tests per month.

At this point, that's not nearly enough.

It marks one of the fastest tests for COVID-19 available and comes just a week after the FDA approved another 45-minute rapid point-of-care test.

Will this supercede the 45-minute test or will they be able to increase the amount of tests they can do by using both? This article doesn't answer that question.

The United States on Thursday became the country with the largest number of cases, surpassing China and Italy, and on Friday, the U.S. hit more than 100,000 diagnosed cases of COVID-19.

[...]

The U.S. is now adding more than 14,000 new cases per day.

While Trump will not be able to "open up" the country by Easter as he's claimed he wants to do, getting everyone tested to isolate the virus will be key to get it going again.