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Comment by MiroF | Hacker News Reader

> why not make testing every last American (multiple times, as necessary) priority #1

These discussions are so far divorced from the reality of the interventions available to policymakers.

That may be true, but when Congress is willing to spend trillions of dollars on mitigating this pandemic, then it doesn't seem so far-fetched to me any more. How much would it cost to develop a test method that could be engineered to support testing the entire population of the United States? In normal times I'd say obviously this is a non-starter, but now I'm thinking we have a pretty big budget.

In practice it would look something like "Test every last American [with insurance coverage]" plus the usual assumptions about people without medical insurance not existing.

Even still, we just can't scale up PCR like that.

How long does it take to build PCR machines? Why can't we build 100,000 of them (or whatever the appropriate number is)?

If it costs tens of billion dollars, so be it. That's far cheaper than shutting the economy for months at time.

This is essentially a war-time effort we are in. I believe government has the authority to mandate that companies with relevant manufacturing capability build and sell these machines in order to combat the virus.

Yea, having lab experience, I think as long as the equipment, reagents, and consumables are all available, lab techniques scale fairly well. You might be running your scientists ragged between installing the new instruments, keeping all the machines running and prepping assays, but it'll get done.

However, sufficient availability of supplies and equipment for this scale of operation is a pretty big if.

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