(PATH screenshot)

Say you’re a health ministry staffer for a small country in the developing world or a health department leader in a tiny American county. Your boss has just assigned you to evaluate the more than 1,000 COVID-19 diagnostic tests available worldwide and make a recommendation on which one your agency should buy.

A new online data dashboard tool from Seattle-based nonprofit PATH has provided a good place to start for more than 2,000 public health officials, most of them from outside the U.S.

“We’ve been pretty positively surprised with the amount of user interaction we’ve had,” said Neha Agarwal, a senior commercialization officer with PATH. “It’s reaching a lot of the low-income countries that we were hoping we’d reach.”

PATH in late November launched the Tableau-based dashboard that provides at-a-glance summaries and tables of important information related to COVID-19 diagnostic tests.

The goal was two-fold. For starters, the data is essential to help decision-makers worldwide navigate through the “tidal wave” of tests available to detect COVID-19, said Roger Peck, a project manager at PATH.

Unlike vaccines, which go through a strictly regulated process, the barriers to entry for COVID tests are low, Agarwal said. And since this is a global pandemic that’s affecting the most affluent nations of the world, there’s a lot of cash available to develop tests.

“Diagnostic companies flooded the market, because all of a sudden there’s money to be made,” she said. “These tests aren’t that hard to manufacture.”

UW Medicine testing station
A nurse prepares to screen a patient for coronavirus at a drive-through testing station at UW Medical Center – Northwest. (UW Medicine Photo / Randy Carnell)

Within a few months there were hundreds of tests available. But out of all those tests, only 22 have received emergency-use listings from the World Health Organization, which is the gold standard in public health.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest are bad, Peck said. Hundreds have been approved by regulatory agencies in the U.S. or other countries. Many were developed early in the pandemic, but have been superseded by newer, more-accurate techniques. And some may be perfectly valid, but were developed by companies that don’t know how to navigate the regulatory process.

That makes it extremely difficult for public health officers to evaluate them, Peck said — especially in countries already battling other endemic diseases.

PATH’s dashboard helps health officers zero in on which tests work best given their circumstances and what’s available and affordable — for example, which tests are available locally, or which can be imported.

So far, the dashboard has attracted more than 2,000 unique visitors, Agarwal said, with about 70% from outside the U.S., including some federal agencies.

The dashboard also highlights global inequities in access to healthcare. It shows that more than 900 of the 1,100 available tests have been developed in just four countries: the U.S., China, Japan and the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the entire continent of South America has access to only 10 home-grown COVID diagnostic tests; Africa has only six.

That data helps raise awareness to countries that need help securing COVID testing, Agarwal said. “We’re not going to solve all those inequities,” Agarwal said. “But we need to understand where those diagnostic deserts are.”

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