Tuesday January 18, 2022
Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday January 18, 2022
COVID-19 home testing kits: should we be worried about their environmental impact?
March 10, 2021
The highly transmissible Omicron variant has led to renewed interest in home testing kits. The UK is getting through millions of these tests each week, while US president Joe Biden has just ordered 500 million kits to send to Americans.
Along with vaccinations and better medication, the availability of rapid testing has meant that many countries are in a much better place to combat the pandemic than they were a year ago.
As with everything, though, testing has an environmental impact that warrants some investigation. So should we be worried about millions – or billions – of plastic test tubes and swabs?