Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-south-korea-uses-driv...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/us/coronavirus-nursing-ho...
Staying alone for 14 days in self imposed quarantine is a potential death sentence anyway for many in our JIT hand-to-mouth sectors of society.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...
No pandemic: What the hell do we pay you for.
Pandemic: What the hell do we pay you for.
He absolutely did dump everyone in the pandemic command chain in NSC/DHS, and then not replace them. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/
When recently asked about this and his proposals to defund the CDC by the press, he said in response “I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”
The original CDC batch became tainted but were more accurate...unfortunately the CDC version was also giving false positives and didn't meet QC. To make matters worse CDC rules required very stringent guidelines for approval from third parties and states. Most of that has been lifted (I think this is what Trump was referring to when he said he was lifting something from the Obama admin, though I don't think it started with him. But who knows because Trump is often full of bluster.)
Here are a few articles about it.
https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-testing-kits-flawed....
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51491763
https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus-covid-19-...
I wish people would stop pointing to South Korea and China as the paradigm of how this should be treated. It's entirely possible that the "drive thru" model with relatively inaccurate kits could make things worse. There isn't much point in producing millions of tests if they are no more accurate than a coin flip and can take up to 8 times to properly diagnose someone. Not to say the US hasn't bungled this and wasted some precious time.
The one thing, I'm pretty confused about at this point is how this has spread so quickly in Italy.
The infection is at the lung while the swabs are done to the upper respiratory tract. There will be misses no matter how good the kits are.
I can't see any easy way to get that info from your description. Can you give an actual link?
That is the thing. This discussion started around whether the CDC should have created their test and the claim was the CDC's actions were a response to the inaccuracy of the WHO test. But part of the accuracy of any test is whether the virus in a location at all - if the virus is, say, only in a person's lungs, any test will have trouble using blood or spit.
The infection is at the lung while the swabs are done to the upper respiratory tract.
I’m not aware of evidence that the CDC designed primers are any better, and have read anecdotal evidence that they fail basic QA tests in open source design software used for this sort of thing.
This was compounded by bad regulations which hamstrung local labs from doing their own testing.
I don't think the German test was any more inaccurate BTW.
The "livescience" link is a confusing story which seems to be talking about the US, CDC test: Last week, the CDC had begun to ship about 200 testing kits to labs across the U.S. and 200 more to over 30 other countries so that more facilities could conduct testing for the new coronavirus.... The CDC is working closely with the states to correct the issues in the testing kits, Messonnier said.
The BBC link is about the WHO test, says no one knows what is going on but gives multiple possible explanations:
One possible explanation is the tests are accurate and the patients do not have coronavirus at the time of testing
Alternatively, there could be a problem with the way the tests are being conducted... There has also been some discussion about whether doctors testing the back of the throat are looking in the wrong place.
A final option is the RT-PCR test for the new coronavirus is based on flawed science.... if there is a poor match between the primer and the virus in the patient, then an infected patient could get a negative result.
Use > or " or *
> One possible explanation is the tests are accurate and the patients do not have coronavirus at the time of testing
> Alternatively, there could be a problem with the way the tests are being conducted... There has also been some discussion about whether doctors testing the back of the throat are looking in the wrong place.
> A final option is the RT-PCR test for the new coronavirus is based on flawed science.... if there is a poor match between the primer and the virus in the patient, then an infected patient could get a negative result.
2) Some article point to the main vector in Italy being patient left in a hospital for 36 hour before being diagnosed and treated. This allowed the disease to spread in the community where testing was not being done - kind of like the US.
3) The Chinese test may indeed might have had problems at various points (your first link is rather anecdotal, hardly proves the test was a "coin flip". Other posters note your links don't back your arguments). The American test had even more problems and still hasn't ramped up to strong production. Making tests is hard, it seems. The CDC's "your test has problems and we know we can do better" attitude looks misguided in retrospect.
4) It seems like you're doing a bunch of speculation with little evidence. I suggest you look at infection and mortality as a basis for thinking about what country is doing well or badly. [1]
That's misleading. Korea has the highest active case ratio of any of the hardest hit countries. The flip side of the lowest CFR coin is that Korea also has by far the lowest recovery rate of any of those countries.
You need to wait for the active cases to turn into deaths or recoveries.
From JHU CSSE:
South Korea
Confirmed: 7,382
Deaths: 50
Recovered: 118
Existing: 7,214
If you're just looking at recovery rate (also misleading), Iran seems much better than Korea:
Iran
Confirmed: 6,566
Deaths: 194
Recovered: 2,134
Existing: 4,238
In all other measure, South Korea is doing well. Avoiding death is much unambiguous a measure.
Edit: Yes, because Korea has experienced an exponential increase in cases, most cases in Korea are "new" but this is true for most other countries - though countries where they only find cases by people dying might be different but not in a good way.
Edit2: Also, it is true that Korea's lower mortality is likely partly a product of Korea's widely testing and finding asymptomatic carriers. But this is also a good thing since it allows Korea to get these people to quarantine and lower the transmission rate, hence the declining rate of infection there.
Confirmed cases: heavily dependent on tested people. 1500 in US vs 100k in S. Korea makes the comparison useless. Also, who is tested? In Italy they started testing only symptomatic people after a while. China has changed the parameters a few times in these last weeks.
Deaths: are all deceased people tested?
Recoveries: what constitutes as a recovery? Highly variable on a per country basis.
I wonder if WHO has published some standards.
That is the whole point of my comment. There are many countries that would appear to be even better than Korea by your naive interpretation of CFR. Germany, India, Russia, Brazil, Iceland, Mexico, and many other countries have 0% CFR. That just means that like in Korea, the infected haven't had time enough to die.
Once again, "You need to wait for the active cases to turn into deaths or recoveries."
Sure, countries that don't enough cases shouldn't be compared but countries with an equivalent growth pattern make sense to compare. At the same time, we can look at the total outside China fetal rate and that's about 2%, which again Korea is doing notably better than. All of this is in context of most infection being new, all of it.
Sure, CFR may not be the final rate one sees but that doesn't mean it doesn't give significant information about what's happening.
The point I've been arguing is that the Korean strategy involves finding asymptomatic cases and preventing these becoming more symptomatic cases by quarantining them, getting those exposed tested and so-forth.
One possibility is this means more of those they find are not seriously ill and won't become seriously ill and this reduces the overall CFR, which can be seen in a comparison to other nations with equivalent numbers of infections. This makes sense to me but can indeed only be verified once this whole horrible scenario plays out.
No. The average time to die after infection is 28 days. Korea has been testing aggressively, and 28 days ago had fewer than 50 cases, despite finding cases earlier in their development. These other countries found cases who were already infected longer. That's why they have more deaths but also why they have more recoveries. You cannot gauge effectiveness of treatment until you've given the treated time to recover or die.
> This makes sense to me but can indeed only be verified once this whole horrible scenario plays out.
This can be verified today by the lower number of recoveries.
Yeah, and as I already noted, this situation MEANS that these other countries are failing to control the infection because they are finding infections late, which is going to mean more deaths later.
> You cannot gauge effectiveness of treatment until you've given the treated time to recover or die.
Sure, I shouldn't imply Korea does just better treatment rather than that the treatment/test combination regime of Korea seems like the superior model relative to other countries and I think have mostly said that. We can see notably that the infection rate in Korea has dropped off markedly in the last few days.
I never disputed that.
> Sure, I shouldn't imply Korea does just better treatment
You didn't imply that. You stated explicitly that Korea does better treatment when that statement is based on a gross misunderstanding of CFR data and said you were going to spread that misinformation. ("I darn well intent [sic] to keep pointing to this.") That's the only thing that I took issue with.
> We can see notably that the infection rate in Korea has dropped off markedly in the last few days.
That has nothing to do with fatality rate.
"China and Korea have effectively dealt with the virus, infections in both those areas have been declining. And Korea now is effectively the lowest fatality rate for any of the effected countries which points to excellent surveillance and adequate treatment."
Instead of: "China and Korea have effectively treated the virus, infections in both those areas have been declining. And Korea now is effectively the lowest fatality rate for any of the effected countries which points to excellent surveillance and treatment."
But this isn't big change. Moreover, I think Korean model - ie, lots of testing - looks good in total and I think I've made clear that's what I advocate.
I would note in China's case, with infections declining everywhere, the fatality rate outside Hubei is fairly low also.
No, it doesn't. All it points to is that the cases are still active and have not had a chance to die. You cannot draw any other conclusions from that fatality data.
> I would note in China's case, with infections declining everywhere, the fatality rate outside Hubei is fairly low also.
For exactly the same reason. These infections are newer and have not had a chance to die. With each update, the CFR outside Hubei has increased, as expected.
> I think Korean model - ie, lots of testing - looks good in total
I agree that more testing is better. Why do you keep bringing this up? It has nothing to do with the fatality rate.
TL; DR; Without sufficient testing, hospitals get overwhelmed and death rate skyrockets. Is this "irrelevant".
...
My Gawd, you are the one who launched the massive detour on fatality rates. The topic of my first comment and topic of the OP was test, now like three days ago. You chimed in several posts down with the argument about immediate death rates not being final death, which I indeed didn't make my clear enough but which wasn't crucial to my point, which was and is about testing and related, about the Korean model being other countries should look to. I guess should say that Korean being at least adequate comes from my reading of press reports on Korea and not just statistical values but gruesomely technical do we want to get.
The thing is, I said from the start and I've clarified above, the fatality rate is an important proxy for how well a given country or area is doing as a combination of treatment and testing (but mostly testing). The infection rate is exponential everywhere the infection is not aggressively controlled so a high mortality rate means the country finding infection only having dying people walk in the doors of hospitals.
In that time, we've seen Italy, with a higher mortality rate spike in infections and mortality, now with 10x the death toll of Korea. And yes, as expected, the mortality rate in Korea is inching up but the infect rate is now steadily declining and it seems clear the total deaths there are going to be much less than Italy.
Yes, TESTING is my primary interest and advocating the Korean model related to that. The thing is that a look at the situation in Korea shows that the whole of society has mobilized, testing and treatment has been reorganized for the particular problems COVID presents - there are regular hospitals and COVID hospitals (or some equivalent).
It is irrelevant to the narrow question of whether the data show that Korea has reduced the fatality rate, which is the point being argued. Deaths from heart disease are irrelevant to the same discussion.
> My Gawd, you are the one who launched the massive detour on fatality rates.
It is not a detour. It is the single point being argued. You made an erroneous claim together with a statement that you intend to repeat it. I corrected that claim to prevent you from repeating it. When discussing that correction, it doesn't matter if you also made correct claims like that 2+2=4.
Could the CDC intentionally be avoiding increasing testing to avoid panic? If the numbers are to be believed, no matter what we'll see a sizable number of infected this year and risk losing many of the elderly.
This is the only logical explanation at this point. Or you can replace "avoid panic" with "avoid bad press for Trump".
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Also recall that incompetence in the CDC likely stems from politically-motivated firings and funding cuts in 2018.
I don't think you're wrong about the firings though.
Same is happening in South Korea, Italy, and other places.
There is a ton of research suggesting it's possible to reduce your risk of death by like 99%. There was metastudy on the front page of HN a couple days ago suggesting that vitamin D3 alone can reduce your risk of death by like 50% for those who are otherwise deficient.
The most recent Cochrane review on Vitamin C suggests that that alone can reduce your risk of death from pneumonia by like 80%.
Those aren't even the only things you can do before getting the virus. And once you get the virus there are like 6 different steps by which it kills you, and there are various things you can take to ameliorate what is happening at each step.
Viruses can replicate up to once a minute, so if you've already been letting it replicate inside you for a couple weeks before taking something to block viral replication then taking something to do that isn't going to do anything after the fact, but it's absolutely a misconception to say that there's nothing we can do for fighting viruses.
Not necessarily. You only get accurate numbers for deaths if you test deaths. Some countries reporting zero cases may have had deaths that will never be reported. The US likely has also had unreported deaths.
NPR had a story about genomics lab that repurposed some of it research equipment to provide some testing resources. Apparently about 70 other labs, including Gate's, did similar and provide backup resources. But a month delay seriously damaged the US response.
> But German researchers were devising their own test, which was quickly adopted by the World Health Organization for distribution around the world.
After the C.D.C.’s version turned out to be flawed, the agency continued to pursue it, despite the fact that another diagnostic test was already in wide use.
With F.D.A. approval, the agency could simply have embraced the test used by the W.H.O., Dr. Mina said. The government could do so even now.
“It’s just a very American approach to say, ‘We’re the U.S., the major U.S. public health lab, and we’re going to not follow the leader,’” Dr. Mina said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/02/health/coronavirus-testin...
Personally, if it is low cost enough that I don't need to use health insurance then I am all for it. Health insurance is good enough until surprise they don't want to cover you or you get surprise bills in the mail from the hospital.
Gates Foundation is absolutely forward thinking. I like it a lot.
Constantly amazed this can be a thing in a first world country. Can this actually happen?
They are basically screwed now after maintaining a non-deliquent relationship with their healthcare provider for longer than I've been alive. If this is not emblematic of what's wrong with our healthcare... IDK what is.
Another option is to move to a Medicare expansion state and stop working, which will allow you to immediately qualify for free health care with generally some of the best coverage you can get.
It’s a cost versus benefit analysis and no different than what you see in single payer systems.
I will say from experience that oncology is one therapeutic area where payers wield much less control. Insurers don't like bad press and denying cancer drugs is a great way to end up in the NY Times. That said, if a drug is regarded as "experimental" (either the FDA hasn't approved it for that type of cancer OR there is limited data to suggest it works) they will say "no".
https://www.caremark.com/portal/asset/Formulary_Exclusion_Dr...
When we change insurance plans my kids have to change the brand name of insulin they get. Humolog, Admelog, etc. But the insurance company can't decide that they won't pay for fast-acting and slow-acting insulin. And if there is a medical reason a doctor will sign off on that indicates a specific brand is required, I believe that you can generally get even excluded medicines covered.
Can insurance companies refuse to cover an FDA approved drug that doesn't have a reasonable substitute? OP discussed treatment for leukemia. An ACA plan should cover approved treatments for leukemia, but it might not cover, e.g. the latest CAR-T treatment if it's still in Phase 3. You would need to get into the study, in which case treatment would be free.
How does it happen that the wrong (old) provider still accepts money if they no longer cover you? Can this be used as a legal argument that the old provider is on the hook for coverage since they continued taking the money?
Co-pay is about $10, so for $10 a month I can guarantee my healthcare is working.
You go to a doctor, then the doctor and the insurance have several months of ping pong during which you get about half a ream of "This is not a bill" documents that show a different set of things with different dollar amounts every other cycle, and then eventually you get an actual bill for the largest amount.
If it's wrong, you can spend another year fighting them to fix the billing codes.
It's a total shit show.
At my company's last benefits meeting (where they go over the yearly changes to our insurance coverage) a coworker described a situation where they had a surgery at an in network (accepted by our insurance) hospital, with in network surgeons and nurses, but was assigned an out of network anesthesiologist without his knowledge, and later got a giant bill for it (well over $1000, IIRC).
Even when a person tries to follow all the rules, they find a way to screw you.
And no, the onus isn't on the hospital. They want their pound of flesh even though they assumed you the procedure was covered on the basis of their staff calling your insurance company.
The whole hospital seems designed to set a bunch of elaborate traps and all of these traps will cost you a lot of money. Whatever I hear there is almost no way to protect yourself besides being lucky.
Doubly so since, as a patient undergoing examination/treatment, you have zero chance of sussing out who is who, what organization they work for, how their billing works, etc.
All you know is someone came into the room to run a test or otherwise interact with you. It's not like you can interrogate them and then refuse their services -- among other things, they don't even know how their financial org is going to bill you.
The NHS Commissioning Board's report on Tetrahydrobiopterin/Sapropterin/Kuvan is here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/e12-p-...
I’m a solopreneur and we’ve decided to go without health insurance. The ridiculous premiums + super high deductibles mean even if you were to go to the doctor, you’re still paying full cost.
The gamble is you want to avoid any catastrophic visits which would cost 20k+ to offset the insurance deductible + premiums.
Compared to Australia, US healthcare system would be considered a joke.
If I need a sleep study or further surgery as already recommended then we are looking at $4-5k for that alone not including followup, medications, supplies, or other appointments.
Without the ACA I might be dead today due to costs and availability like if I was denied insurance based on pre-existing conditions and could not afford medical care I needed over the last 5-8 years plus mental health care. My parents paid about $22k out of pocket for a surgery I needed during that time (and on their insurance).
I'd have about $45-50k in the bank if my healthcare over the past decade was 100% covered. That is about 10x my current retirement savings or could be a down payment on a house. The USA is not representative of first world countries or at least should not be directly compared to them when it comes to health care.
At the same time, I’ve been reading papers in top journals about various clever technologies to do rapid (ie <60 minutes) detection of pathogens for years. The latest was using crispr [1]. None of them seem to have left the lab, PCR is still it.
Final point, nanopore sequencers are ideal for rapid home testing, and you get the actual sequence. They are a bit too expensive unfortunately.
availability seems not the be the problem, you can order them since 3 weeks ago from alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...
or, if you prefer from italy: https://www.screenitalia.it/test-coronavirus-covid-19/
the problem here seems to be of an organisational nature...
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/02/why-are-we-bein...
The new fed law and my state make the test itself free, but dont address the high service charge at some medical centers. Sick people might be reluctant to test as early as they should.
it seems clear that the regulations would be harming the public interest and should not be enforced, but you could imagine a scenario where there was a politician with a political grudge against a liberal city like Seattle.
Emergency powers in the western democracies (North America and Europe) are an important aspect of governance and should be routined examined for effectiveness (mock exercises and simulations), efficiency and combating the threat during the most dire times. Coronavirus is not an existential threat but as a thought exercise we can imagine one that has a serious chance of killing 50% of the earth population. Or some serious evil on planet is threatening human existence on earth - incoming asteriod or terrorist organization with AI capabilities. I sound like an alarmist, I know, but the point of this thought exercise is not to induce panic but build a better governance system that can protect the public without giving up civil liberties.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rapid-flu-tests-only-50-to-70-p...
Doing two swabs helps mitigate this, as does comparing anal and oral swabs. Here’s a more thorough breakdown:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1...
The US is perhaps just easier to trial this technology for the Gates foundation, for whatever reason.
Perhaps the plan is to trial/roll this out elsewhere if it succeeds.
This appears far more of the latter.
I mean, the article says they will be able to do about 400 tests a day.
That’s a fraction of the number of tests poor developing countries have been doing for weeks now.
It also doesn't address the point the parent comment was trying to make. Bill Gates worked hard and now he's rich because of it--why does that mean U.S. citizens need to depend on him to stay healthy?
Biggest economy != healthy economy if you can borrow like there is no tomorrow. And thank you, all you suckers in the rest of the world.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/amid-coronavirus-out...
Its hard to put a finger on exactly why they seem entirely incapable of fulfilling their central mission during this crisis. Why were the test kits botched? Why was testing so artificially limited? Why do the primers seem poorly designed? Why does the contact tracing seem to be so behind the ball? Etc.
I think political finger pointing is easy and maybe even satisfying but not helpful or particularly enlightening.
"Now" is the operative word.
You can't just put a government agency in cold storage and thaw it out when you need it. If the budget and leadership get slashed (as they were in 2018), people move on, hard-won lessons get forgotten, and they take a while to get back.
If this happens repeatedly, you lose the ability to attract talented people for a long time.
But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the WHO test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays.
This seems to give some kind of explanation of what was going on:
But there were additional problems with the administration’s approach to testing, according to experts and former officials. From the start, the White House focused on containment, trusting that a limited ban on travel to and from China could somehow force a fast-moving virus to stop cold when it hit the Chinese border. But, while containment might have helped buy the U.S. some time, without aggressive domestic surveillance through testing, it was an incomplete strategy.
Except that doesn't really explain why the CDC didn't do it's job. Surely the White House wasn't actively stopping disease surveillance?
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/coronavirus-testing...
The thing is that Trump indeed seems to be following the standard corporate CEO script: "stop bad news by any means necessary, then sweep the rest under the carpet when the press isn't looking". But this doesn't quite for running an actual country /s/understatement.
From what I gather, designing these things is not actually rocket science, more like grad-level work. The fact that local labs throughout the country were ready to go with their own self-made testing kits supports this.
The focus on containment by the White House IMO was totally appropriate. When you have zero local cases, that's what you focus on... in order to buy you time to prepare, shore up supplies and disaster plans, and distribute test kits. Containment (i.e. closing borders) is the political part of the process, so the Administration focused on that while the scientists are busy designing and distributing the test kits. In theory...
But it doesn't seem there has been much focus on that at all. Containment requires rapid large scale testing. The US doesn't seem at all prepared for that.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22521338.
At least our executive branch had enough common sense to ban flights from China on Jan 31st (and was panned by the "free press" and Democrats in congress for it at the time). Had they not, we'd be dealing with tens of thousands of infections and thousands of deaths by now, as exemplified by Italy.
There are probably thousands of infections in the country already, we just don't know it yet.
Now try Italy or South Korea. Germany still has twice as many cases as the US, and 7.5x as many cases per million of population (12.1 vs 1.6 CPM in the US). Proximity to Italy doesn't do them any favors. To their credit though, they have zero deaths.
If you order the stats by cases per million, the US comes in 40th, so containment doesn't suck too bad, compared to others. By deaths it's the 5th though - the main cluster basically took out a bunch of very old, medically problematic folks at a senior care facility. As the officials from the facility said, about 7 people die there per month under the normal circumstances, but this month they were additionally hit with the coronavirus. Bad luck.
Worth noting that Germany not having any deaths despite such a large number of cases can also indicate that they discover the infection very early, and similarly the number of US deaths can indicate late discovery.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-10/italy-s-h...
> Italy on Jan. 31 suspended flights to and from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan in a bid to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus. The ban, due to last until April 28, was the first by a European Union member. The Czech government later followed suit.
But because it's absolutely false that "all governments are led by idiots", countries with good health care systems are raising awareness of the severity of the issue and taking effective measures.
The US isn't a first-world country; but it is a very rich thirld-world nation.
When you see the ridiculous on hand sanitizer and toilet paper, even if there was an over the counter version, you wouldn’t be able to find one in the store.
This sums up the silicon valley mindset for EVERYTHING. If you find it hard to understand what I am meaning the be worried.
If you experience symptoms for any illness and you care for seniors, you should remove yourself from care.
No need to test.
So I'm not sure if what you are proposing is realistic.
What’s madness is asymptotic people testing themselves.
Should we test for flu, cold as well? All other diseases? Should you only be allowed to be somewhere if you tested yourself within the last N hours ... etc .. because that is the next step, looking at each other with suspicion.
When did you last test yourself? Did you not test yourself? Why not? What are you hiding? What kind of citizen are you? Get back there and start testing yourself.
Are you going to test yourself every day? When you sneeze? In the morning, in the evening?
Stop living in fear. Nothing will happen to you.
there is tons of data, it helps no one when unqualified people add to the noise,
you think it helps you, but the tragedy that it only makes things worse
It took another month for things to seriously change after that was posted. South Korea, a nation of 50 million people, has tested 150,000. The US figure is hard to track but it's at around 2,000 right now. There are almost certainly thousands of people in the US who are infected but have not been tested.
The potential for misuse, abuse, panic and trouble is far bigger than you imagine.
The problem here, with everyone, is that they think that the rest of the population will act like them. Take a test, then if positive but you are not showing any symptoms lay low for a week, avoid contact with others. This is the most common outcome of the disease, 99% of cases nothing will happen. You don't need to do anything at all, clears up on its own. For each one in a hospital, hundreds did not need care.
But no, that's not what would happen at all if the population started self-testing itself. Everyone positive, yet in no need of medical care will rush the emergency, severely impacting health care providers - that will kill more people than COVID itself.
The upheaval this self-testing can cause far exceeds whatever marginal benefits it would produce.
The first rule of medicine: First, do no harm!
Tests are probably not handed out without instructions about the protocol to follow (do not go to emergency, you will be sent back when you do not have severe symptoms etc). If these are not then you pointed out a clear improvement possibility, problem solved.
I think the massive usage of self tests is a very economical way to contain the outbreak.
No, I do not mean the price of the test, I mean the macro economics. Lock downs may be avoided because only infected people must be isolated but the rest can continue to function efficiently.
Even if the containment is not possible by this, it may help to slow down the spread to the level where the health care system could handle severe cases (it is going to be very difficult when spread grows out of control - https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/ff8hns/testimony_... ).
I think that not doing massive testing that is going to be only possible by self testing will create much larger harm.
Edit: the method provided by Bill Gates is not a self test. It is just a way to collect samples. The test will be still done in the lab.
This is where you're off the rails. You're thinking only in terms of danger to the infected. There aren't going to be hospitals in a pandemic!
The problem with this is that that behavior (i.e. "You don't need to do anything at all") tends to infect everyone around the sufferer! And if the virus is a routine flu where 70-80% of the population is immune, that's fine. It spreads a little and stops.
This doesn't work like that. No one is immune to a novel virus. This will spread across the world and infect whole ?!@#$%! cities at once, overwhelming health care facilities with infections that in a normal situation would be trivially treatable in a hospital. But we'll run out of hospital beds given your insane advice, and people will die for lack of care. Seriously, in worst case scenarios literally millions of people are going to be dead by next year in a situation where we could have saved them had we simply done obvious stuff like testing and quarantine and not told them (sigh) "nothing will happen. You don't need to do anything at all, clears up on its own."
Stop this. Stop it. Stop listening to whoever is telling you this nonsense. It's going to get people killed.
in the end this will be used against you and others
next thing you know you are not allowed on a bus if you haven't tested yourself today
I don’t think it’s helpful to dismiss other commenters based upon simply your opinion, and not a set of facts we can all inspect together.
distributing COVID tests to the population is a ridiculous idea that does not do anything but create more panic and trouble.
The problem that needs a solution has nothing to do with whether Random Jane can or cannot (in the privacy of their home) determine if they are infected.
For what is worth, there are people out there, not even few, that would knowingly seek to infect others especially if they themselves suffer almost no effects from the disease. They would do it just for the "lulz". Have you considered that? Being infected, knowing it and suffering no ill effects is an evil superpower.
Please stop
What's your prediction and will you back it like I did?
Not sure why you assume "hysteria" on my side. My opinion could be wrong, but that does not make it a hysteria. Isn't the fear of COVID more a hysteria?
As for your bet - it is overly specific - there could be thousands of similar, equally negative outcomes that would not be in Seattle, or a bus company, etc yet could all be triggered the same way.
I would be most worried of people that want to infect others about finding out anonymously that they are infectious.
EDIT: Due to old comments, I'm rate-limited on this thread so I actually cannot respond (sorry!). I'm interested specifically in the statement about the bus.
"you know that home testing by Gates was not such a good idea, overall it caused more harm than good"
My view is that is a dangerous idea to have untrained, panick people decide if they are sick or not. Too many things can and will go wrong.
However, if you have no reason to believe you are infected, a false positive might easily be more likely than a true positive. And in fact, even a very modest false positive rate would still make it orders of magnitude more likely than a true positive.
Consider that even if you assume the worst about the state of the virus in the US, it's probably a few thousand people. If you randomly tested every person in the US, and the test had a false positive rate of only 1%, you would have thousands of times more positive results than real cases. Someone else in this thread mentioned an existing test that might have a 40% false positive rate.
taking someone's temperature is a well-known concept with long tradition - fever is not something that started occurring in the last two weeks.
if people would did not know what fever meant and how they should act based on a reading on a thermometer what benefits would distributing thermometers have?