6 ms·

Hi - I posted this submission to HN. Based on the comments I'm seeing, it might be helpful if I clarified why I think this news is of extreme significance. The

Hi - I posted this submission to HN. Based on the comments I'm seeing, it might be helpful if I clarified why I think this news is of extreme significance. The key facts are: 1. This is a test that directly detects SARS-Cov-2 virus. It can, if sensitive enough, tell you if you're infected even if you don't have any symptoms. 2. The detection time is very fast: 5 minutes for a positive result; 13 minutes for a negative. 3. The testing device is pretty compact. (Fits on a tabletop.) If, in addition to the above, the following are also true: 4. The sensitivity of the test is high enough. 5. We can quickly scale manufacture of the testing platform and its reagents. Then this development means the beginning of the end of the pandemic.* If all of the above are true, we can deploy fast testing to the entries/exits of factories, offices, etc. Folks who test positive get sent home to self-quarantine; folks who test negative can go back to work. Everyone gets ~13 minutes added to their daily commute, but they can work safely without spreading the virus. The specificity of this test almost doesn't matter. Even if flu cases trigger a positive, those folks can still be sent to secondary testing or home quarantine. The government could pay them 100% of their salary for two weeks and it would still be a fantastic deal for the rest of us. We can also ignore regulatory obstacles such as "this is only allowed in hospitals right now". The wider this testing regime is deployed, the higher a level of economic activity we can sustain while keeping R0 < 1. And given the scale of the stimulus efforts already underway, it's clear the government will do anything it can to revive the economy. Administrative barriers will be abolished as needed. Obviously this scenario is conditional on all the above actually being true. But this is the most hopeful development I've heard of since mid-February. * To be absolutely pedantic, it probably means more like a 95-98% mitigation of the pandemic within a few months.

aledalgrande 7y ago
How much does the quality of sampling influence the result with this machine? You're saying testing at work could be done, but what if the swab is not taken properly? Wouldn't that create a false negative?
- chadmeister 7y ago
  This sounds like a much easier problem to solve than what we're dealing with now
  - aledalgrande 7y ago
    Sure, but if a non professional takes a bad swab on average it wouldn't be safe to talk about deploying these to workplaces and send people back to work like Trump wants to do. Even less if you think about these people testing positive after an hour of commute on public transport.
    - briandear 7y ago
      So close public transport. Touch of the US doesn’t use public transportation.
      - aledalgrande 7y ago
        That is just a single example. You go out with your car, you get a coffee in a crowded Starbucks, go to work and test positive. Now what? There's a new cluster.
        minitoar 7y ago
        Even if people are out being infectious for a full day before they test positive it’s a massive improvement.
    - chadmeister 7y ago
      So we allocate 0.0001% of that 2 trillion stimulus package that just passed to educate and train people on it. Worst WORST case is nothing comparable to the worst case we could face otherwise. This is an insignificant problem.
      - aledalgrande 7y ago
chadmeister 7y ago
This is a really interesting perspective on the result. I also share your optimism on what this will mean for the state of the pandemic, at least in the US for now. This very well could be the begining of the end of this crisis.
dbrait 7y ago
I agree with it being a positive development, but it is probably a story for any potential second waves. Don't think it can be scaled quickly enough to change much in the current wave. It also doesn't solve many of the spontaneous human interactions that are hurt by this. A 13 min per person test that needs to be adminstered by somebody who knows what they are doing works fine in a factory. It probably is still too much friction for a restaurant, the subway, a stadium, kid's soccer practice, etc.
- ZeKK14 7y ago
  We can have testing stations everywhere, available to everybody, providing some kind of certificate. You would have to show this certificate when entering stadiums or restaurants to prove you're not infected. Still not perfect, but this could be a workaround.
  - duncan-donuts 7y ago
    I have a lot of problems with this conceptually, but I think we should do something like this eventually. My biggest problem is my wife is sick, I’m not, I have a certificate that says I’m totally fine but I could now be infected, might be contaminating things, etc. What good is a certificate? We’d need to be tested almost constantly for it to mean anything.
    - ZeKK14 7y ago
      The goal would not to be 100% sure, only to reduce the spread to fall below R0 < 1 while keeping the economy running and people sane. And yes, you would have to be re-tested regularly.
- jwlake 7y ago
  I would open a bar in a minute with this device. :) It would have 6 ft spaced lines day and night. 10 drink minimum with test.
- CaptArmchair 7y ago
  Exactly. The problem with self testing is trust. If you get tested by an authority - a doctor - then there is only so much discussion to be had. Whereas if you are asked to test yourself in the morning, who's going to be able to verify your claimed outcome? Consider STD's and - in particular - HIV. Even with medical testing, the first basic lesson any teenager (should) get(s) is to use a condom if you don't know your partner. Moreover, it's a good thing that many legal systems (a) only grant doctors the ability to issue sick leave and (b) protect the rights of those who are issued sick leave. Labor laws being byzantine as they are, allowing employers to test their workers at their own discretion poses a wide range of prickly legal issues. The fact that South Korea or China (arguably) succeeded in curbing their epidemic happened because their public governance puts the collective above personal rights and people are totally fine with that because that's a deep part of the moral standard of their culture. Current mass quarantine exercises are painful in the short term, but if you can keep them up for significant time, it might be possible to safeguard liberties and protections that aren't self-evident. You could curtail those exercises and favor self testing in order to open up the economy quicker, but doing that in a meaningful way requires that we all are prepared to compromise on some of those protections and rights, with all the unintended societal consequences that might bring.
busyant 7y ago
> The detection time is very fast: 5 minutes for a positive result; 13 minutes for a negative. To quote from Abbott's press release: "delivering positive results in as little as five minutes and negative results in 13 minutes." I'm all for fast approvals and faster testing, but let's not make this sound like it's going to be the equivalent of popping into the McDonald's drive-thru for coffee. You can drive a truck through the loop hole of "as little as...." I think this will help, but I am not sure that an Abbott press-release deserves the breathless praise that you're giving it.
Dahoon 7y ago
>reagents Reagents for SARS-Cov-2 testing are in short supply. How is this better in that area compared to the new Danish test that doesn't use those reagents at all?
klenwell 7y ago
> Then this development means the beginning of the end of the pandemic. The end of the pandemic, even with this, is still going to be a lot more complicated. Zooming out a bit: The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated. It depends, for a start, on making a vaccine. If this were a flu pandemic, that would be easier. The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch. The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said. But it’s also the fastest step among many subsequent slow ones. From https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-coronavirus-end/608719/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-.... That's the optimistic case per Ed Yong. You acknowledge you're looking at an optimistic scenario. I hope everything breaks as smoothly as you imagine. Looking at the record of the US Federal response thus far, if anything like this level of optimism was warranted, we almost assuredly wouldn't be in the mess we are at the moment.
LinuxBender 7y ago
Does the device prevent the collection or storage of a persons DNA? I all collected material destroyed / sanitized?

aledalgrande 7y ago

How much does the quality of sampling influence the result with this machine? You're saying testing at work could be done, but what if the swab is not taken properly? Wouldn't that create a false negative?

chadmeister 7y ago
This sounds like a much easier problem to solve than what we're dealing with now
- aledalgrande 7y ago
  Sure, but if a non professional takes a bad swab on average it wouldn't be safe to talk about deploying these to workplaces and send people back to work like Trump wants to do. Even less if you think about these people testing positive after an hour of commute on public transport.
  - briandear 7y ago
    So close public transport. Touch of the US doesn’t use public transportation.
    - aledalgrande 7y ago
      That is just a single example. You go out with your car, you get a coffee in a crowded Starbucks, go to work and test positive. Now what? There's a new cluster.
      - minitoar 7y ago
        Even if people are out being infectious for a full day before they test positive it’s a massive improvement.
  - chadmeister 7y ago
    So we allocate 0.0001% of that 2 trillion stimulus package that just passed to educate and train people on it. Worst WORST case is nothing comparable to the worst case we could face otherwise. This is an insignificant problem.
    - aledalgrande 7y ago

chadmeister 7y ago

This is a really interesting perspective on the result. I also share your optimism on what this will mean for the state of the pandemic, at least in the US for now. This very well could be the begining of the end of this crisis.

dbrait 7y ago

I agree with it being a positive development, but it is probably a story for any potential second waves. Don't think it can be scaled quickly enough to change much in the current wave. It also doesn't solve many of the spontaneous human interactions that are hurt by this. A 13 min per person test that needs to be adminstered by somebody who knows what they are doing works fine in a factory. It probably is still too much friction for a restaurant, the subway, a stadium, kid's soccer practice, etc.

ZeKK14 7y ago
We can have testing stations everywhere, available to everybody, providing some kind of certificate. You would have to show this certificate when entering stadiums or restaurants to prove you're not infected. Still not perfect, but this could be a workaround.
- duncan-donuts 7y ago
  I have a lot of problems with this conceptually, but I think we should do something like this eventually. My biggest problem is my wife is sick, I’m not, I have a certificate that says I’m totally fine but I could now be infected, might be contaminating things, etc. What good is a certificate? We’d need to be tested almost constantly for it to mean anything.
  - ZeKK14 7y ago
    The goal would not to be 100% sure, only to reduce the spread to fall below R0 < 1 while keeping the economy running and people sane. And yes, you would have to be re-tested regularly.
jwlake 7y ago
I would open a bar in a minute with this device. :) It would have 6 ft spaced lines day and night. 10 drink minimum with test.
CaptArmchair 7y ago
Exactly. The problem with self testing is trust. If you get tested by an authority - a doctor - then there is only so much discussion to be had. Whereas if you are asked to test yourself in the morning, who's going to be able to verify your claimed outcome? Consider STD's and - in particular - HIV. Even with medical testing, the first basic lesson any teenager (should) get(s) is to use a condom if you don't know your partner. Moreover, it's a good thing that many legal systems (a) only grant doctors the ability to issue sick leave and (b) protect the rights of those who are issued sick leave. Labor laws being byzantine as they are, allowing employers to test their workers at their own discretion poses a wide range of prickly legal issues. The fact that South Korea or China (arguably) succeeded in curbing their epidemic happened because their public governance puts the collective above personal rights and people are totally fine with that because that's a deep part of the moral standard of their culture. Current mass quarantine exercises are painful in the short term, but if you can keep them up for significant time, it might be possible to safeguard liberties and protections that aren't self-evident. You could curtail those exercises and favor self testing in order to open up the economy quicker, but doing that in a meaningful way requires that we all are prepared to compromise on some of those protections and rights, with all the unintended societal consequences that might bring.

busyant 7y ago

> The detection time is very fast: 5 minutes for a positive result; 13 minutes for a negative. To quote from Abbott's press release: "delivering positive results in as little as five minutes and negative results in 13 minutes." I'm all for fast approvals and faster testing, but let's not make this sound like it's going to be the equivalent of popping into the McDonald's drive-thru for coffee. You can drive a truck through the loop hole of "as little as...." I think this will help, but I am not sure that an Abbott press-release deserves the breathless praise that you're giving it.

Dahoon 7y ago

>reagents Reagents for SARS-Cov-2 testing are in short supply. How is this better in that area compared to the new Danish test that doesn't use those reagents at all?

klenwell 7y ago

> Then this development means the beginning of the end of the pandemic. The end of the pandemic, even with this, is still going to be a lot more complicated. Zooming out a bit: The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated. It depends, for a start, on making a vaccine. If this were a flu pandemic, that would be easier. The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch. The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said. But it’s also the fastest step among many subsequent slow ones. From https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-coronavirus-end/608719/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-.... That's the optimistic case per Ed Yong. You acknowledge you're looking at an optimistic scenario. I hope everything breaks as smoothly as you imagine. Looking at the record of the US Federal response thus far, if anything like this level of optimism was warranted, we almost assuredly wouldn't be in the mess we are at the moment.

LinuxBender 7y ago

Does the device prevent the collection or storage of a persons DNA? I all collected material destroyed / sanitized?