Comment by LolWolf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LolWolf | Hacker News Reader

It's incredible seeing this on hn. For context, while the FoHo is sometimes good for very, very breaking and recent stories, it's a little hard to overdo the niche it fits in Stanford culture: it's pretty much the main and only tabloid for fast-paced news and (sometimes) absurd 'takes' on things happening around campus.

While I don't doubt the story, I would always take it with a grain of salt. I don't personally know the person they claim is running these "under the table" tests, but the tests are very simple, so it wouldn't surprise me if it was actually true. (Most first or second year biology/bioengineering students can easily run RT-PCR without an issue, especially if they already have the primers available.)

EDIT: I was just contacted by one of my friends who knows of a few students and their labs doing this. Apparently there is more than one.

If I heard someone in my lab was running PCR on saliva samples potentially infected with 2019-nCoV, I'd lose my shit.

At the moment, you shouldn't be going to a lower than a biosafety level 4 lab at all.

You don't need live viruses for testing. You only need some viral RNA material so you can inactivate the virus by heating the samples to a certain temperature for example. Hazardous work for sure.

At the moment, most tests are certainly being done in less than BSL4, there aren't that many of them.

https://www.liquisearch.com/biosafety_level/list_of_bsl-4_fa...

This is incorrect. The CDC recommends BSL-2 for routine diagnostics and BSL-3 for isolating the virus in cell culture. (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nCoV/lab/lab-biosafety-...)

So your plan is to greatly reduce testing capacity?

Yea, the test itself is incredibly simple. The challenge to scale it up is regulations and bureaucracy, because they all fear the liability of a test that can sometimes produce false negatives.

It's not the liability here, it's the fact that cutting corners means you now have more people walking around that your lab said was fine, that aren't, and vice versa. If someone gets a false positive then, following recovery, they'll assume they don't need to take safety precautions like social distancing seriously, which can put them in real danger. And false negatives mean you've now infected the "non-corona" wing of the hospital when your patient with non-corona pneumonia is admitted.

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