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Comment by glofish | Hacker News Reader

If anything sets a bad precedent, citizens starting testing themselves and each other, what could possibly go wrong (sarcasm)...

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.

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You're not thinking clearly here. Home disease tests in the form of a thermometer are very common; the "next steps" you describe simply don't happen outside of pandemic situations, even though there's no technological or legal reason they couldn't.

the analogy is not even remotely valid

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?

If I could test myself continuously, I would. Why would you not?

because it never works like that, never that simple, there are always bigger costs

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 think that the argument “it never works like that” should be coupled with at least one data point.

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.

"never works like that" was meant to reflect that naive, knee jerk solutions never account for all the complexities of the problem and do more harm than good.

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.

there are still no facts and no sources in your argument. I cannot and will not engage in this sort of meaningless argumentation without data.

Please stop

This is mindless hysteria. And I suspect you know it. On the other hand, maybe you do, in fact, believe it. Let's make a good faith attempt to test how truly we believe in our predictions. I predict that the Gates Foundation permitting home testing in Seattle will not result in Seattle's public transit system only permitting COVID-19 tested individuals by the end of 2020. In order to back that, I will put up $1000 at even odds. Reply here to take me up on it.

What's your prediction and will you back it like I did?

Hysteria: emotional excess.

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.

The Gates Foundation is only issuing home testing kits in Seattle so it's hard to argue for elsewhere. However, I'm comfortable negotiating the terms. What are yours? I'd like to have a conclusion within a reasonable time so no bet lasting 50 years or anything, but otherwise, let's hear your offer.

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.

my offer is that in two years we look back at this and a reasonable majority of health professionals will say:

"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.

Tests like this have false positive rates that are significant. The test may be a useful tool when we already reasonably expect someone to test positive (showing symptoms plus contact with a known case or travel from an affected area).

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.

This is FUD. Comprehensive testing and isolation is the only thing that can contain a pandemic. There's so little data available every additional point is valuable.

testing should not be done Random Joe at home!

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

There is absolutely not tons of data, the CDC and FDA have been trying to manipulate the infection figures by preventing people from being tested. Have a look at this thread from a former FDA commissioner, which was posted on Feb 2(!) https://twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/12240422206653071...

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.

There is literally almost no data. We are barely testing at all in the US. And even if we were, the goal here isn't good science, it's preventing deaths. People who get tested "random Joe" at home and get a positive result are less likely to infect others.

Someone sitting in their house is testing themselves is not data! You are confusing data with a number that ticks up. Ha, another infected! Look DATA!

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!

Counter argument.

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 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 [...]

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.

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