G4 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 13 , 2022
BY TATUM HUNTERIn January, the government
promised each U.S. household
four free, at-home coronavirus
tests shipped to their door. Check
the U.S. Postal Service order form
today, though, and a banner
warns of high demand and de-
layed shipments.
Companies with app-based
testing claim they can help fill
the gap. Some use delivery ser-
vices such as Amazon and Gopuff
to get tests to you faster than you
might be able to book an appoint-
ment at a testing facility.
New start-ups and existing
testing companies are hoping
that tech elements will set them
apart from traditional at-home
tests, and their products run the
gamut from quick and easy app-
based antigen tests you can order
on Amazon to $474 molecular-
testing setups you plug into your
wall.
I tried out four popular at-
home tests: an On/Go antigen
test from Intrivo, a BD Veritor
antigen test from Becton, Dickin-
son and Co. and molecular tests
from Cue Health and Detect,
paying close attention to their
accuracy, price, speed, privacy
and ease of use.
With its saturated colors and
illustrations in the flat art style
made infamous by Facebook, the
On/Go app lent a Silicon Valley
sheen to the grim task of testing
myself for a dangerous virus.
Never did I expect to hear a
coronavirus test described as
“confidence boosting,” but that’s
exactly what On/Go’s instruc-
tional video insisted. Meanwhile,
the Cue Health app, which syncs
to a small machine that uses
electrochemistry to detect viral
material in your sample, made
me feel smart and science-y as I
tapped around its sterile screens.
Each of the products I tried
came with an app that walked me
through the steps of my tests.
That made it tough to mess up or
misinterpret my results. If I go to
the doctor, it will be simple to
remember which days I tested.
On/Go even recorded my symp-
toms for easy reference. And I
can show or share my results
with an employer, event host or
friend with the tap of a button.
But every time a product digi-
tizes your information, that in-
formation becomes hard to con-
trol. With the exception of Detect
— which says it doesn’t collect
data on its customers — all the
companies gather data such as
your email address and phone
number that’s arguably unneces-
sary. Intrivo (which makes On/
Go) can use your data for market-
ing, according to its privacy pol-
icy; Cue Health can share it with
undisclosed third parties, and
BD can do both. In that sense, a
fully analog test would provide
the same results with better pri-
vacy.
Here are the Help Desk’s rec-
ommendations for the best app-
based at-home coronavirus tests
for your needs.For accuracy
Because Cue and Detect are
molecular tests, they are more
sensitive than the On/Go and BD
Veritor antigen tests. That means
it takes less viral material to
make a test register as positive.
In a study for Food and Drug
Administration authorization,
Cue’s accuracy — defined as the
average of its percentage of cor-
rect negative and positive tests —
was 98.25 percent, it says. Cue’s
tests got the same results as
lab-based PCR tests 97.8 percent
of the time in a study by the Mayo
Clinic. Detect says its tests get the
same results as PCR tests
97.3 percent of the time.
Comparing the accuracy of
tests is tricky, since different
companies use different mea-
sures. On/Go said its tests are 95
percent accurate, while BD Veri-
tor broke its results into the
percentage of correct positive
tests (84.6 percent) and correct
negative tests (99.8 percent). If
you opt for an antigen test and
test negative, the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention
recommends taking a second test
a day or so after your first one to
double check your results.
All four companies say they
can reliably detect the omicron
variant.For price
At $23.98, On/Go’s two-testpack at Walmart.com is the most
affordable option. If you live in a
city, it’s also the most accessible
— the tests are available on the
delivery app Gopuff, which usu-
ally takes about an hour to bring
snacks, drinks and now coronavi-
rus tests right to your door. The
test is also available on Amazon,
as well as some Walgreens and
Kroger stores, according to the
company’s website.
BD Veritor is only a few dollars
more, at around $35 at Amazon,
CVS and Everlywell.
Detect’s Starter Kit, which in-
cludes the plug-in testing device
and one coronavirus test, costs
$75. It’s often sold out.
Cue, at $474 for the chargeable
testing device and three corona-
virus tests, is the most expensive
option. The company offers a
$49-a-month membership,
which comes with 10 coronavirus
tests, a discounted testing device
($149) and round-the-clock ac-
cess to doctors via messaging
and, occasionally, video, Cue
Health CEO Ayub Khattak said.For speed
If you’re pressed for time, On/
Go is the best option. The test
takes about 15 minutes to com-
plete.
BD Veritor took about 25 min-
utes. Cue’s took about 30 min-utes, and Detect’s took an hour.For privacy
If you don’t want companies
collecting data about you and
your health, Detect appears to be
the best option by far. It doesn’t
collect or store any data on its
coronavirus test customers, ac-
cording to co-founders Eric
Kauderer-Abrams and Owen
Kaye-Kauderer. I made it all the
way through my test without
sharing information about my-
self or setting up an account. (It’s
worth noting that Detect’s priva-
cy policy leaves room for ad
targeting and third-party data
sharing. Detect spokeswoman
Shawna Marino said coronavirus
test customers would be alerted
if data practices ever change.)
Cue’s privacy policy says it
shares data with “subcontrac-
tors, service providers, and other
third parties.” It wouldn’t say
whether any of those are market-
ers or advertisers, and it wouldn’t
provide a list. Cue doesn’t sell
your data to anyone, company
spokesman Dan Bank said.
Of the four products I tried,
On/Go and BD Veritor appear to
collect the most data. On/Go
asked for my height, weight and
symptoms, though all were op-
tional. BD Veritor required my
home address, legal name andlegal sex. When in doubt, remem-
ber it’s okay to use alternative
names, one-time-only email ad-
dresses and burner phone num-
bers to protect your information,
especially if you’re not testing for
work or travel.
Intrivo, which makes On/Go,
doesn’t share data with third
parties, co-CEO Ron Gutman
said, but its privacy policy says it
can use your data to show you ads
for Intrivo products, as well as
offers from third parties.
BD Veritor’s companion app,
Scanwell, has a privacy policy
with plenty of wiggle room for
data sharing.
“The Scanwell privacy policy is
broadly written to cover the shar-
ing of data with third parties for
advertising purposes in the event
Scanwell has a legitimate need
for such sharing,” BD spokes-
woman Megan Trivelli said.
Scanwell is not currently shar-
ing data from BD’s coronavirus
tests for ad purposes and BD
doesn’t sell your data, Trivelli
said. BD would not share the
names of the corporate third
parties it shares your data with.For ease of use
I had small hiccups with each
product, but overall, I found all
four tests easy to use with mini-
mal fuss and plenty of directionalong the way.
Risk of complications from
covid-19 goes up with age, so it’s
important that any app-based
coronavirus test prioritizes us-
ability for older populations.
While all four companies claimed
their products are easy for people
over 65 to use, Detect had the
strongest support, with 92 per-
cent of customers over age 65
who chose to take a post-pur-
chase survey saying they’re likely
to recommend the test to others.
Cue didn’t share any studies on
usability information for older
people.
As for antigen tests On/Go and
BD Veritor, a report by nonprofit
health organization ECRI ranked
On/Go in the top tier of at-home
antigen tests for usability. BD
Veritor ranked in the bottom tier.
All four tests require scanning
a QR code, and some explain that
step better than others. To scan a
QR code, just open your camera
app and point the camera at the
tiny black-and-white square. If a
link pops up, tap on it. In some
cases, the testing app will open
its own camera and ask you to
scan.For event planning
If you’re planning an event and
want to make sure your guests
have recently tested negative for
the coronavirus, On/Go has an
easy tool that takes you through
the whole process, complete with
discounted tests that ship to your
guests and real-time updates on
who’s completed their tests.
(Guests must opt to share their
test results with the host.)
On the On/Go app’s home
screen, tap the plus sign in the
bottom middle, then select
“2Gather Events.”For verified test results for
traveling
Both Detect and Cue offer
proctored tests on a video call,
which give you verified results
and easy documentation for trav-
eling. (Some countries, including
the United States, require a re-
cent negative test to fly into the
country. In the United States,
that test must be supervised in
real time through an audio or
visual connection if you conduct
it at home, according to the CDC.)
Detect’s proctored tests cost
$20 each. Cue’s require upgrad-
ing your subscription to its
$89.99-a-month plan.HELP DESK
Are those app-based home coronavirus tests worth it?
We compared four popular techy options for
price, speed, accuracy, privacy and ease of use
APPLE/ISTOCK/WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATIONBY NATHAN GRAYSONOn Sept. 16, management at
Blackbird Interactive, the 300-
person studio behind “Hardspace:
Shipbreaker” and the upcoming
strategy game “Homeworld 3,”
sent out a survey. The goal was
simple but unheard of in the over-
worked video game industry: to
gauge interest in a four-day work-
week.
The timing was auspicious. One
anonymous respondent described
the “Shipbreaker” team as
stressed and burned-out, explain-
ing that supporting the game’s
early access release had taken “a
heavy and unexpected toll.”
Last week Blackbird an-
nounced it will permanently
adopt a Monday-Thursday work-
week across all six of its projects.
But the journey to get there was
not without bumps in the road.
Some at the studio worried that in
an industry inundated with peri-
ods of brutal crunch, removing
hours from the week would just
necessitate more of it. Others
looked at the late stage of develop-
ment that projects like “Ship-
breaker” were in and feared the
timing of such a change couldn’t
have been worse. A three-month-
long test of the four-day workweek
quickly disabused them of these
notions. But concerns remain as
to whether a four-day workweek
can keep overwork at bay — or can
even be maintained — in an indus-
try where the majority of the
workforce is not unionized and is
susceptible to sudden shifts
brought on by buyouts, layoffs and
executive whims.
The “Shipbreaker” team was
one of the two teams participating
in the four-day workweek test,
which ran from Sept. 20, 2021, to
Dec. 10, 2021. While the other
team, working on a rogue-like
deck-building game code-named
“Owl,” was in the early preproduc-
tion stages of development, the
“Shipbreaker” team was truly in
the thick of it — and had been for
quite some time. The game, in
which players crawl through the
guts of derelict spaceships and
slice them up for salvage,
launched into early access on
Steam in 2020. Since then, the
“Shipbreaker” team had been
working to get it across the finish
line, maintain its sizable, content-
hungry community and live up to
the terms of a deal with French
publisher Focus Entertainment.
According to the survey, the re-
sults of which were shared with
The Post, some developers were
working over 40 hours each week.
Blackbird, an independent stu-
dio trying to stay aloft in a time of
rapid industry consolidation and
a growing talent shortage, real-
ized a four-day workweek could
kill multiple birds with one stone.
“When people get stressed out
and burned out, you can’t really
treat it. They need to take a big
chunk of time off, and even then,
they come back frazzled. We’re
looking at how we can prevent this
in an ongoing way,” said Blackbird
CEO Rob Cunningham. There was
also the question of retention: “An
independent studio like Blackbird
doesn’t benefit from the infinite
resources of these megacorpora-
tions,” he said. “We have to do
what we can to communicate to
the talent what’s the upside of
coming here.”
Blackbird’s workweek reshuffle
comes during a time when work-
ers across all sectors are reevaluat-
ing their relationship with their
jobs. The pandemic-born “Great
Resignation” has seen millions of
Americans quit their jobs, while
workers at global companies such
as Starbucks and Amazon have
moved to unionize and improve
their workplaces.
The idea of the four-day work-
week is not new. Louis Hyman, a
historian of work and business at
Cornell University’s School of In-
dustrial and Labor Relations, ex-
plained that the current five-day
workweek composed of eight-
hour days was born of factory
worker strikes in the 19th and
20th centuries, as well as nation-
wide union strength in the years
following World War I. After work-
ers pressured the likes of Henry
Ford and, eventually, the U.S. gov-
ernment to adopt the five-day
workweek, there were widespread
calls for a four-day workweek.
Recently, the idea has resur-
faced. Companies as large as Pana-
sonic have implemented versions
of it, as have video game studios
like “Guardians of the Galaxy” de-
veloper Eidos-Montréal and indie
studios Vodeo Games and KO_OP.
During 2020, “Fortnite” developer
Epic instituted a policy of givingemployees alternating Fridays off,
but shelved that change late last
year despite employee uproar, ac-
cording to a report by Bloomberg.
“In a lot of ways, the belief that
the normal job is 9-to-5, Monday
through Friday, has been steadily
falling apart since the 1970s,” Hy-
man said, citing the draining na-
ture of modern knowledge jobs,
the fragmentation of service work
via the gig economy and the need
for many to work multiple jobs.
“There’s been a big reset with
covid in thinking about, ‘What is
work? Why do I have to go to the
office? And if I don’t have to go to
the office, do I have to work five
days a week?’ ”
Still, Blackbird employees had
concerns going into the four-day
workweek test. How would a team
already struggling at 40-plus
hours per week manage to hit
their milestones with eight fewer
hours? What would they have to
streamline? And would some
team members feel only minor
ripples from the change, while
others dealt with full-blown after-
shocks?
“I think immediately my mind
went to, ‘We can’t do that,’ ” said
Elliot Hudson, game director on
“Shipbreaker.” “When it was first
proposed to me, I just flat out said,
‘No, it’s not going to work for this
team.’ ”
F or “Shipbreaker” lead pro-
ducer Jessica Klyne, acclimating
took time and discipline.
“We stopped doing one-hour
meetings and even shortened
some to 10-minute check-ins,” Kly-
ne said. “We questioned the at-tendance of everyone in meetings
and encouraged all attendees at all
levels to question their own at-
tendance. We were ruthless when
it came to protecting our team’s
time. We had to be.”
Other stumbling blocks includ-
ed holiday weeks in which work-
ers already would have had a day
off.
“It’s an ongoing conversation,”
said Katie Findlay, Blackbird’s di-
rector of operations. “But general-
ly speaking, we’re just communi-
cating that if it’s a holiday Monday,
you get a three-day workweek;
good for you.”
As the test progressed, it did not
take long for workers to find that
their workdays and — more im-
portantly — their overall mental
health had improved.
“Personally, it makes me feel
like I can stay in the industry
longer than I thought I could,” said
the studio’s creative director, Trey
Smith. “There’s a soul tax that
comes with shipping every game.”
There were also less obvious,
unexpected benefits. “When you
have a day off that you can use to
go see a doctor and you don’t have
to tell your co-workers, it adds a
level of privacy I thought was real-
ly nice,” said Leelee Scaldaferri, a
3D artist on “Shipbreaker,” who
also noted that running errands
during the pandemic on days
when stores weren’t crowded alle-
viated stress.
Eventually, because workers
were better-rested and happier,
they worked more efficiently.
“Not having Friday there any-
more made the four days moreprecious,” said Scaldaferri. “Es-
sentially, in so many words, I
didn’t f--- around as much.”
By the time the test wound
down, numerous members of the
“Shipbreaker” team concurred:
The four-day workweek was more
than just a success.
“Our team was under huge
pressure and on the verge of burn-
out due to the nature of working
from home during a critical period
of production, with the added
stress of covid on top of that,”
Klyne said. “When the trial was
over, it was obvious the four-day
workweek saved us. I don’t think
we could have got to where we are
today without it.”
Findlay cautioned, however,
that industry professionals
should not think of the four-day
workweek as a silver bullet, but
rather one of many longer-term
solutions to preserve employee
health even when inevitable peri-
ods of more intense work — say,
ahead of a deadline or milestone
— do arrive.
“When it comes to those crunch
times, we want you to be not al-
ready burned out,” Findlay said.
In the end, 100 percent of 51
developers surveyed after the test
said they wanted to permanently
switch to the four-day workweek,
compared with 82 percent who
believed a four-day workweek was
better than a five-day workweek
before the test. Additionally,
91 percent said it improved their
work-life balance, 89 percent said
the same of wellness, 90 percent
believed it will improve retention
and 79 percent said it bolstered
their ability to complete work.
As with Saturdays and Sundays,
workers are free to use Fridays as
they please, whether that means
chilling out, doing chores or wrap-
ping up work that previously
slipped through the cracks. It falls
on leadership to avoid pressuring
workers, explicitly or implicitly,
into regularly doing the last.
“One of the key pieces to all of
this is that our leadership, wheth-
er it’s studio or per team, has to set
the example,” Findlay said. “So if
your manager or producer is com-
ing in and obviously working on
Friday — answering emails and all
of that — then me if I’m, like, a
junior programmer, I’m going to
feel the need to do that as well....
So we’re really doubling down onmessaging to our leads to make
sure they’re modeling behavior
they want to see.”
Data suggests that the test was
not entirely successful on that
front. Of employees surveyed,
29 percent said they worked 32
hours per week during the final
four weeks of the test, while 47
percent said they worked 32 to 36
hours, 12 percent said they worked
36 to 40 hours and another 12
percent said they worked more
than 40. Speaking with The Post,
some leads confessed they’d been
working a few hours on Fridays
during the test phase — though
largely to ensure successive weeks
were organized well enough that
their subordinates wouldn’t have
to sweat coming in on their new
Saturday, which was Friday.
Blackbird Chief Creative Offi-
cer Rory McGuire said company
policy states that if anybody de-
cides to come in on Fridays, they
must be compensated with an-
other day.
“If anyone is working [on] a
Friday more than a few times a
year,” said McGuire, “that’s very
strong evidence we need to look at
our organization to figure out
where the process is failing.”
Emma Kinema, a campaign
lead at CODE-CWA, the labor
union aiding workers at compa-
nies like Activision Blizzard,
pointed out that even the most
ideal version of Blackbird’s four-
day workweek arrangement still
leaves final say and veto power in
the hands of management.
“Maybe today the bosses are
friendly and have a policy you like,
but what if circumstances change
or there’s new management, or the
company gets bought out or does a
reorg?” Kinema said.
For the time being, Blackbird is
committed to the four-day work-
week and is in the process of tran-
sitioning all its teams. Hudson,
once the four-day workweek’s big-
gest skeptic, is now an evangelist.
“I know there’s probably going
to be a lot of folks in this industry
who are ambivalent or even
scared to make a change like this,”
he said. “Just have faith that your
team will make it work in a way
that works for them, because
that’s exactly what happened to
us.... Just give it a shot. If it
doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. You
can always go back.”A video game studio adopted a 4-day workweek. It ‘saved us,’ employees say.
ISTOCK/WASHINGTON POST ILLUSTRATION