9 ms·

Frequent, rapid testing could turn national Covid-19 tide within weeks

39 points by chewdatgenie 6y ago

04rob 6y ago
Wasn't this the White House strategy? They were doing daily rapid antigen tests, and have had several outbreaks.
- cryptoz 6y ago
  No, the White House strategy was to ridicule anyone who wore a mask. To make life miserable for you at work if you considered the virus to be a risk. The White House strategy was based on convincing people there that the virus was fake. Not anything to do with rapid daily antigen test. From what I read, that wasn't an enforced thing anyway. Sounds like people there were also just not getting the tests at all.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Whether you want to blame the CCP, WHO or the White House, the reality is that corona is highly contagious and everybody will get it, mask or not. It was the job of the CDC to create a vaccine after SARS-1 in 2002/2003, and they failed to either fund or develop one. There is very little any politician can do once a virus is endemic, as it is in the US, especially with 50 states. As an example that's comparable to the US situation overall, Toronto did everything right including testing from Day One, yet they've reported 100,000 cases and are doing a hard lockdown: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/21/americas/toronto-lockdown-covid-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/21/americas/toronto-lockdown-cov...
  - zzleeper 6y ago
    It's not that surprising that you were downvoted, given the bias seen lately in HN. More on point, what works on a national scale might not work only within the white house, because (besides lack of mask) the white house is not completely isolated from the rest of the country.
  - ScottBurson 6y ago
    I read an article the other day about a nurse with Covid patients who refused to believe they had Covid at all, because they're convinced it's a hoax. The damage Trump has done is incalculable.
- addicted 6y ago
  They also haven’t been following basic safety protocols. Further, we learnt when Trump had COVID that they were actually not even testing Trump on a regular basis. That’s probably also true of other members of the administration.
- danenania 6y ago
  It seems that even extremely frequent testing isn’t enough to prevent outbreaks without any other precautions. False negatives are too common.
- twblalock 6y ago
  The problem with testing is that a negative test today does not prevent you from catching the virus tomorrow. All you have to do is be in contact with someone who has it. So you can't just test. You also need to avoid contact with other people, unless they have also tested negative. The White House clearly was not doing that. Even if they had, the tests are not totally reliable. Given the number of people who come and go from the White House on a regular basis, it's kind of a surprise they didn't have an outbreak earlier than they did.
charlieflowers 6y ago
I think the US gov't is too mired down in ... well, problems ... to do anything this pragmatic, efficient and effective.
- ISL 6y ago
  Cornell is testing ~everyone once a week. After an initial small flurry of cases, they've picked off 1-2 cases a day before they have a chance to enter the broader populace. https://covid.cornell.edu/testing/dashboard/ https://covid.cornell.edu/testing/dashboard/ Their case-positivity rate is ~100x lower than many places in the United States.
  - ollien 6y ago
    I go to a university where we're doing something similar - weekly testing for everyone at minimum, 2x per week if you're high risk or live in a dorm with a communal bathroom. For the most part, we've been doing well, but recently we've had a small surge (~100 students in quarantine, about 4-10 cases per day, with about 4000 undergrads, only part of which are on campus at the moment). We're in a much more suburban area than Ithaca, so that probably plays a factor.
  - bluedino 6y ago
    The problem with testing once a week is there are four more days you can be positive on. Also, by the time you get your test results, you have been positive and spreading. I get tested on Monday mornings, got a call Thursday night telling me not to come in on Friday. What good did that do?
    - cryptoz 6y ago
      Agreed, but what good did it do? It prevented you from further spreading the virus more than if you had not got the call. Every bit helps. Perfection is the enemy of good. Rather test weekly than never. Rather test daily than weekly. Why not hourly or every 15 minutes though? Have to have a balance somewhere. What good does it do to get a test and have results 2 hours later, if you spread the virus in that 2 hours? Better than spreading it for 2 weeks! But it still allows for it to spread. Something is way better than nothing.
mchusma 6y ago
At this point there are
xscott 6y ago
I would love for this whole thing to end as much as anyone, but I don't see how this gets anything back to normal. In January of this year, there were a negligible amount of people in the US with Covid. Let's say now in November everyone gets tested every day, and you have an unbelievable compliance for self quarantining on positive results. It would never happen, but pretend it's 99.9% of people following the rules to "drive the virus towards elimination within weeks". Great, now you think you've beaten it back to where it came from. How does this do anything other than reset the clock back to last January just in time for next January? As soon as everyone lowers their guard and goes back to normal, it's going to spread again. We need immunity from a vaccine or from it running its course to be done with this. What am I missing? Are we going to setup nationwide contact tracing this time? Just a few visitors from other countries, and we're at it again.
- taeric 6y ago
  This is my problem with most every success story so far. For how quickly this spreads where it spreads, and that it is a corona virus, I'm not seeing any panacea here. I say this as someone that is fine complying with my states restrictions. I even think they are correct, if only as something to try. I'm just not seeing the end game here. :(
  - threeseed 6y ago
    End game is pretty obvious. US will simply let another few hundred thousand more people die until the vaccine is widespread.
- bluGill 6y ago
  You need to get positives down to zero for two weeks before you declare success. Daily testing, with quarantine of any positives and then contact tracing two levels (everyone you contacted and then their contacts could get to zero quickly. But the quarantine step is required for every one to pull that off. Of course this works out easy in a post. Good luck implementing it in real life. People violate quarantine if they can.
mchusma 6y ago
There are over 6 vaccines that have very low expected downside (vaccines rarely have severe side effects and these have none found in thousands of tests)and are all expected to work (>90%). They are all currently banned (people who want them can't buy them legally), and the FDA is refusing to even discuss lifting the ban for 3 weeks. It seems odd to discuss anything other solution than letting people who want to take vaccines, take them. Literally if the vaccines were known to have side effects 10x worse than the worst side effects in history, it would still be orders of magnitude safer to give to those over 65 than not. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
- vmurthy 6y ago
  Banned? Perhaps you are under the impression that the data has been reviewed by the FDA? IIRC, the EUA analysis is in flight (for a December timeframe) and that is to ascertain that the data is up to the mark and not to take what the companies have announced at face-value.
sohamsankaran 6y ago
This has been obvious for months -- Romer has been yelling from the rooftops about it -- and yet no major western govt save the Brits have attempted to even try this strategy. Madness.
- threeseed 6y ago
  Because the more effective and proven strategy is to simply pay businesses and people to lockdown. It has been effectively eliminated in both Australia and NZ this way. And the impact to the economy is significant but it's turning out to be far less severe than the rest of the world and their on/off again strategy.
  - anonytrary 6y ago
    > simply pay businesses and people to lockdown This is anything but simple. Vast majority of businesses and people will not be supported if indefinite lockdown continues. The hidden costs of bankrolling an entire country for an indefinite period is much greater than the cost to deploy a persistent, scalable testing framework. The latter is also an investment into the future as this will not be the last pandemic.
    - threeseed 6y ago
      No. It's very simple. You just keep paying people until the lockdown is over. Again this isn't some hypothetical exercise. Australia and NZ have just done this and now have basically eliminated COVID-19. As opposed to manufacturing and distributing 100s of millions of tests each week which is very much an unproven exercise.
      - eloff 6y ago
        I'll believe it is simple when you specify how much money is needed and where it comes from to do that.
        threeseed 6y ago
jonahbenton 6y ago
Have no patience for these fantasies. This like saying- if pigs flew, we could have national broadband just by outfitting the piggies with this neato lightweight low power wireless transmitter thingee I invented. The COVID pandemic would be over if a sufficient number of people adopted the well-documented and publicized behaviors to do so. Many who want to cannot for economic and related logistical reasons. And very many do not want to. Making pronouncements that disregard the shameful rejection of science and public health on the national and local level by so many leaders and assume a national consensus to the contrary exists and is merely lacking a technical means of delivery...this specifically is what I have no patience for. Stay safe if you are able. My ashamed apologies if through no fault of your own you are not. Your country has failed you and all of us.
rectang 6y ago
It won't turn the tide, because there is a huge population in the US which, as an expression of political identity, will refuse to get tested — or wear masks or take any other precautions for that matter. This group will keep the virus alive no matter what, endangering not only themselves, but the rest of us. ETA: Many downvotes, many upvotes. Downvoters: I would love to hear from you what you find objectionable.
akvadrako 6y ago
These tests have a very high false negative rate. Before a test you have about a 13% chance of having covid. After a negative test it's about 11%. It doesn't seem plausible that's enough to make a big difference.

39 points by chewdatgenie 6y ago

04rob 6y ago

Wasn't this the White House strategy? They were doing daily rapid antigen tests, and have had several outbreaks.

cryptoz 6y ago
No, the White House strategy was to ridicule anyone who wore a mask. To make life miserable for you at work if you considered the virus to be a risk. The White House strategy was based on convincing people there that the virus was fake. Not anything to do with rapid daily antigen test. From what I read, that wasn't an enforced thing anyway. Sounds like people there were also just not getting the tests at all.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Whether you want to blame the CCP, WHO or the White House, the reality is that corona is highly contagious and everybody will get it, mask or not. It was the job of the CDC to create a vaccine after SARS-1 in 2002/2003, and they failed to either fund or develop one. There is very little any politician can do once a virus is endemic, as it is in the US, especially with 50 states. As an example that's comparable to the US situation overall, Toronto did everything right including testing from Day One, yet they've reported 100,000 cases and are doing a hard lockdown: https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/21/americas/toronto-lockdown-covid-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/21/americas/toronto-lockdown-cov...
- zzleeper 6y ago
  It's not that surprising that you were downvoted, given the bias seen lately in HN. More on point, what works on a national scale might not work only within the white house, because (besides lack of mask) the white house is not completely isolated from the rest of the country.
- ScottBurson 6y ago
  I read an article the other day about a nurse with Covid patients who refused to believe they had Covid at all, because they're convinced it's a hoax. The damage Trump has done is incalculable.
addicted 6y ago
They also haven’t been following basic safety protocols. Further, we learnt when Trump had COVID that they were actually not even testing Trump on a regular basis. That’s probably also true of other members of the administration.
danenania 6y ago
It seems that even extremely frequent testing isn’t enough to prevent outbreaks without any other precautions. False negatives are too common.
twblalock 6y ago
The problem with testing is that a negative test today does not prevent you from catching the virus tomorrow. All you have to do is be in contact with someone who has it. So you can't just test. You also need to avoid contact with other people, unless they have also tested negative. The White House clearly was not doing that. Even if they had, the tests are not totally reliable. Given the number of people who come and go from the White House on a regular basis, it's kind of a surprise they didn't have an outbreak earlier than they did.

charlieflowers 6y ago

I think the US gov't is too mired down in ... well, problems ... to do anything this pragmatic, efficient and effective.

ISL 6y ago
Cornell is testing ~everyone once a week. After an initial small flurry of cases, they've picked off 1-2 cases a day before they have a chance to enter the broader populace. https://covid.cornell.edu/testing/dashboard/ https://covid.cornell.edu/testing/dashboard/ Their case-positivity rate is ~100x lower than many places in the United States.
- ollien 6y ago
  I go to a university where we're doing something similar - weekly testing for everyone at minimum, 2x per week if you're high risk or live in a dorm with a communal bathroom. For the most part, we've been doing well, but recently we've had a small surge (~100 students in quarantine, about 4-10 cases per day, with about 4000 undergrads, only part of which are on campus at the moment). We're in a much more suburban area than Ithaca, so that probably plays a factor.
- bluedino 6y ago
  The problem with testing once a week is there are four more days you can be positive on. Also, by the time you get your test results, you have been positive and spreading. I get tested on Monday mornings, got a call Thursday night telling me not to come in on Friday. What good did that do?
  - cryptoz 6y ago
    Agreed, but what good did it do? It prevented you from further spreading the virus more than if you had not got the call. Every bit helps. Perfection is the enemy of good. Rather test weekly than never. Rather test daily than weekly. Why not hourly or every 15 minutes though? Have to have a balance somewhere. What good does it do to get a test and have results 2 hours later, if you spread the virus in that 2 hours? Better than spreading it for 2 weeks! But it still allows for it to spread. Something is way better than nothing.

mchusma 6y ago

At this point there are

xscott 6y ago

I would love for this whole thing to end as much as anyone, but I don't see how this gets anything back to normal. In January of this year, there were a negligible amount of people in the US with Covid. Let's say now in November everyone gets tested every day, and you have an unbelievable compliance for self quarantining on positive results. It would never happen, but pretend it's 99.9% of people following the rules to "drive the virus towards elimination within weeks". Great, now you think you've beaten it back to where it came from. How does this do anything other than reset the clock back to last January just in time for next January? As soon as everyone lowers their guard and goes back to normal, it's going to spread again. We need immunity from a vaccine or from it running its course to be done with this. What am I missing? Are we going to setup nationwide contact tracing this time? Just a few visitors from other countries, and we're at it again.

taeric 6y ago
This is my problem with most every success story so far. For how quickly this spreads where it spreads, and that it is a corona virus, I'm not seeing any panacea here. I say this as someone that is fine complying with my states restrictions. I even think they are correct, if only as something to try. I'm just not seeing the end game here. :(
- threeseed 6y ago
  End game is pretty obvious. US will simply let another few hundred thousand more people die until the vaccine is widespread.
bluGill 6y ago
You need to get positives down to zero for two weeks before you declare success. Daily testing, with quarantine of any positives and then contact tracing two levels (everyone you contacted and then their contacts could get to zero quickly. But the quarantine step is required for every one to pull that off. Of course this works out easy in a post. Good luck implementing it in real life. People violate quarantine if they can.

mchusma 6y ago

There are over 6 vaccines that have very low expected downside (vaccines rarely have severe side effects and these have none found in thousands of tests)and are all expected to work (>90%). They are all currently banned (people who want them can't buy them legally), and the FDA is refusing to even discuss lifting the ban for 3 weeks. It seems odd to discuss anything other solution than letting people who want to take vaccines, take them. Literally if the vaccines were known to have side effects 10x worse than the worst side effects in history, it would still be orders of magnitude safer to give to those over 65 than not. https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history.html https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....

vmurthy 6y ago
Banned? Perhaps you are under the impression that the data has been reviewed by the FDA? IIRC, the EUA analysis is in flight (for a December timeframe) and that is to ascertain that the data is up to the mark and not to take what the companies have announced at face-value.

sohamsankaran 6y ago

This has been obvious for months -- Romer has been yelling from the rooftops about it -- and yet no major western govt save the Brits have attempted to even try this strategy. Madness.

threeseed 6y ago
Because the more effective and proven strategy is to simply pay businesses and people to lockdown. It has been effectively eliminated in both Australia and NZ this way. And the impact to the economy is significant but it's turning out to be far less severe than the rest of the world and their on/off again strategy.
- anonytrary 6y ago
  > simply pay businesses and people to lockdown This is anything but simple. Vast majority of businesses and people will not be supported if indefinite lockdown continues. The hidden costs of bankrolling an entire country for an indefinite period is much greater than the cost to deploy a persistent, scalable testing framework. The latter is also an investment into the future as this will not be the last pandemic.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    No. It's very simple. You just keep paying people until the lockdown is over. Again this isn't some hypothetical exercise. Australia and NZ have just done this and now have basically eliminated COVID-19. As opposed to manufacturing and distributing 100s of millions of tests each week which is very much an unproven exercise.
    - eloff 6y ago
      I'll believe it is simple when you specify how much money is needed and where it comes from to do that.
      - threeseed 6y ago

jonahbenton 6y ago

Have no patience for these fantasies. This like saying- if pigs flew, we could have national broadband just by outfitting the piggies with this neato lightweight low power wireless transmitter thingee I invented. The COVID pandemic would be over if a sufficient number of people adopted the well-documented and publicized behaviors to do so. Many who want to cannot for economic and related logistical reasons. And very many do not want to. Making pronouncements that disregard the shameful rejection of science and public health on the national and local level by so many leaders and assume a national consensus to the contrary exists and is merely lacking a technical means of delivery...this specifically is what I have no patience for. Stay safe if you are able. My ashamed apologies if through no fault of your own you are not. Your country has failed you and all of us.

rectang 6y ago

It won't turn the tide, because there is a huge population in the US which, as an expression of political identity, will refuse to get tested — or wear masks or take any other precautions for that matter. This group will keep the virus alive no matter what, endangering not only themselves, but the rest of us. ETA: Many downvotes, many upvotes. Downvoters: I would love to hear from you what you find objectionable.

akvadrako 6y ago

These tests have a very high false negative rate. Before a test you have about a 13% chance of having covid. After a negative test it's about 11%. It doesn't seem plausible that's enough to make a big difference.