3 ms·

It's why we should be doing massively increased blood testing and test manufacturing to resolve that question. For the last few months it has been the single mo

It's why we should be doing massively increased blood testing and test manufacturing to resolve that question. For the last few months it has been the single most important question and they're putting very few resources behind trying to answer it. We can't test blood properly? Of course we could. They are choosing not to, is the actual context. It's a large mistake. How many infections have you already had? How widespread is it really? No answer, no attempt to answer at scale. At its best, it's immense incompetence in action by the authorities in charge of dealing with this mess.

snowwrestler 7y ago
> It's why we should be doing massively increased blood testing and test manufacturing to resolve that question. Yes, literally everybody agrees with this. > For the last few months it has been the single most important question and they're putting very few resources behind trying to answer it. This is not true, every available resource is being deployed to expand testing capability. Again, literally everyone wants to. > We can't test blood properly? Of course we could. They are choosing not to, is the actual context. It's a large mistake. No one is choosing against testing today. The large mistake was 3 months ago when the federal government should have started activating all of this. > How many infections have you already had? How widespread is it really? No answer, no attempt to answer at scale. At its best, it's immense incompetence in action by the authorities in charge of dealing with this mess. Totally agree on the incompetence, but again, the critical moment passed months ago. Everyone is desperately trying to catch up now.
hcknwscommenter 7y ago
You seem to conflate antibody testing with viral rna testing. The former is somewhat difficult because you can't make the reagents necessary overnight, and the reagents are unique for the virus. Essentially, you have to clone the gene for an immunogenic portion of the virus (the spike protein most likely), express it in a recombinant host (which may require extensive optimization), purify it, and then validate that it properly detects blood of people who were confirmed positive for viral RNA and then recovered. That all takes time, and then you have to scale up manufacturing. In contrast, the the viral rna (RT_PCR) test takes about a day to design and the reagents are synthesized overnight and then you can run the test in the morning of the second day. Scaling that up to 1 million viral RNA tests a day should add at most a month, but our country already runs this number of tests a day if you count every academic, research, hospital, and CLIA lab, so the manufacturing capacity already exists.

snowwrestler 7y ago

> It's why we should be doing massively increased blood testing and test manufacturing to resolve that question. Yes, literally everybody agrees with this. > For the last few months it has been the single most important question and they're putting very few resources behind trying to answer it. This is not true, every available resource is being deployed to expand testing capability. Again, literally everyone wants to. > We can't test blood properly? Of course we could. They are choosing not to, is the actual context. It's a large mistake. No one is choosing against testing today. The large mistake was 3 months ago when the federal government should have started activating all of this. > How many infections have you already had? How widespread is it really? No answer, no attempt to answer at scale. At its best, it's immense incompetence in action by the authorities in charge of dealing with this mess. Totally agree on the incompetence, but again, the critical moment passed months ago. Everyone is desperately trying to catch up now.

hcknwscommenter 7y ago

You seem to conflate antibody testing with viral rna testing. The former is somewhat difficult because you can't make the reagents necessary overnight, and the reagents are unique for the virus. Essentially, you have to clone the gene for an immunogenic portion of the virus (the spike protein most likely), express it in a recombinant host (which may require extensive optimization), purify it, and then validate that it properly detects blood of people who were confirmed positive for viral RNA and then recovered. That all takes time, and then you have to scale up manufacturing. In contrast, the the viral rna (RT_PCR) test takes about a day to design and the reagents are synthesized overnight and then you can run the test in the morning of the second day. Scaling that up to 1 million viral RNA tests a day should add at most a month, but our country already runs this number of tests a day if you count every academic, research, hospital, and CLIA lab, so the manufacturing capacity already exists.