Good morning! Today: over-the-counter home tests for covid-19 are finally here—our senior biomedicine editor Antonio Regalado tried out three of them. Also: the internet is excluding non-English speakers, what India needs to do to get through its covid crisis, and can "democracy dollars" help to clean up politics in the US? Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day. | We reviewed three at-home covid tests. The results were mixed.
What’s new: Over-the-counter home tests for covid-19 are finally here. Some experts believe these cheap, fast tests could be used to screen the whole population every week to help quash clusters of infections before they develop. MIT Technology Review’s senior biomedicine editor Antonio Regalado obtained kits sold by three companies and tried them out. And he filmed the process. What he found: He ended up learning an important lesson: while some people worry that home tests could miss covid cases, the bigger problem may be just the opposite. These tests have “false positive” rates of around 2%, which means that if you keep using them, you’ll eventually test positive, even though you don't have covid-19. If you tested everyone in the US tomorrow with over-the-counter tests, the large majority of positive results—maybe nine out of 10—would be false alarms.
So what’s the verdict? There is an important role for consumer tests. They’re easy to use, cheaper than existing mail-in tests, and more convenient than waiting at a testing site. However, their real value for the US may have been six months ago, rather than now, when vaccines are widely available. Read the full story. | | The internet is excluding Asian-Americans who don’t speak English The problem: The web is built on an English-first architecture, and most of the big social media platforms that host public discourse in the United States put English first too. And as technologies become proxies for civic spaces in the United States, the primacy of English has been magnified. For Asian-Americans, the move to digital means that access to democratic institutions is impeded by linguistic barriers. A snapshot: From mistranslated voter registration websites to vaccine appointment pages, these problems have a real impact. Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that non-English-speaking patients were 35% more likely to die of covid than those who spoke English. Embedding inequality: The challenges of language online go beyond the US—and down, quite literally, to the underlying code. Sri Lankan researcher and data scientist Yudhanjaya Wijeratne looked at the code libraries and software tools companies like Twitter and Facebook use, and found that the mechanisms to monitor hate speech in most non-English languages had not yet been built. Read the full story. —Tate Ryan-Mosley | | Can “democracy dollars” keep real dollars out of politics? Most Americans would never consider running for office for a simple reason: they can’t afford it. Seattle hopes to change that with democracy vouchers—a taxpayer-funded program that mails Seattle residents four $25 certificates to donate to local candidates. Launched in 2015, Seattle’s voucher program was the country’s first of its kind. It hasn’t eradicated the influence of mega-donors, but it’s certainly weakened their influence. Now a host of other US cities are considering whether they need a voucher initiative, too. Read the full story. —Julia Hotz This story is from the latest edition of MIT Technology Review, which is all about cities. Check out the full magazine, and if you haven't yet, subscribe! | | We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction in these weird times. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or tweet 'em at me.) + May the Fourth be with you. You need this Star Wars themed song in your life. And this one, too.
+ The view from the Empire State Building.
+ Rome's Colosseum is getting a stage again, to let visitors see its full majesty. Another reason to bump a visit to Rome up the bucket list....
+ Some gorgeous nature photography (thanks Peter!)
+ These pandemic-inspired faux New Yorker covers are amazing. (WP $)
+ David Hockney's sketchbook. | | The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 What India needs to get through its covid crisis
Aggressive public health measures, emergency aid, and a lot more vaccines. (TR)
+ India has now recorded more than 20 million covid cases. (BBC)
+ The situation in India is likely to remain awful for weeks to come. (AP)
+ The rich are fleeing. (Quartz) 2 Slowly but surely, Americans are living post-pandemic lives App data shows restaurant bookings, travel, and entertainment starting to recover. ( WSJ $) + 5,000 people went to a mini music festival in England on Sunday in a test of safety measures. ( The Guardian) + The EU will let fully-vaccinated tourists visit from June. ( CNN) 3 Online "vaccine culture" is utterly ludicrous 💉 Americans argue over which vaccine is cooler while the rest of the world goes without. ( The Atlantic $) + The FDA is imminently going to approve Pfizer's vaccine for teens. ( Ars Technica) + The pressure is growing to lift vaccine patent protections. ( NYT $) + These things should not stop you getting a vaccine in the US. ( ProPublica) 4 Here’s what China wants from its next space station Prestige, international clout, and some exciting science. ( TR) 5 Twitter has launched its Clubhouse rival Anyone with more than 600 followers can host a live audio "room." ( TechCrunch) + Clubhouse has taken off in the Middle East. ( NYT $) 6 Inside Amazon's shadow workforce in Mexico More than two-thirds of its workforce there is outsourced to contractors, and they get a rough deal as a result. ( Reuters) + Amazon paid no tax at all in Europe last year. ( The Guardian) 7 Apple's App Store is on trial 📱 If Epic wins its lawsuit against the company, the implications could be huge. ( NPR) + Antitrust regulators around the world increasingly have their sights on it, too. ( Recode)
8 A third of Basecamp employees quit after an explosive meeting
This is all entirely self-inflicted on the part of the company's founders. (The Verge)
9 How the Pentagon started taking UFOs seriously 🛸
And thus relaxed its grip on a decades-old taboo. (New Yorker $)
10 A man made a joke cryptocurrency called "SCAM"... and people bought into it
This sector is now beyond parody. (Vice) | | "I don’t know how we’re going to be able to do this." —Akiko Kariya, 40, a volunteer at the Olympics in Tokyo, which is currently in a state of emergency, expresses skepticism to the New York Times that the Games can go ahead safely. | | | | | |
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