FDA grants emergency use authorization for 5-13 minute Covid-19 test
abbott.com
abbott.com
The key facts are:
1. This is a test that directly detects SARS-Cov-2 virus. It can, if sensitive enough, tell you if you're infected even if you don't have any symptoms.
2. The detection time is very fast: 5 minutes for a positive result; 13 minutes for a negative.
3. The testing device is pretty compact. (Fits on a tabletop.)
If, in addition to the above, the following are also true:
4. The sensitivity of the test is high enough.
5. We can quickly scale manufacture of the testing platform and its reagents.
Then this development means the beginning of the end of the pandemic.* If all of the above are true, we can deploy fast testing to the entries/exits of factories, offices, etc. Folks who test positive get sent home to self-quarantine; folks who test negative can go back to work. Everyone gets ~13 minutes added to their daily commute, but they can work safely without spreading the virus.
The specificity of this test almost doesn't matter. Even if flu cases trigger a positive, those folks can still be sent to secondary testing or home quarantine. The government could pay them 100% of their salary for two weeks and it would still be a fantastic deal for the rest of us.
We can also ignore regulatory obstacles such as "this is only allowed in hospitals right now". The wider this testing regime is deployed, the higher a level of economic activity we can sustain while keeping R0 < 1. And given the scale of the stimulus efforts already underway, it's clear the government will do anything it can to revive the economy. Administrative barriers will be abolished as needed.
Obviously this scenario is conditional on all the above actually being true. But this is the most hopeful development I've heard of since mid-February.
* To be absolutely pedantic, it probably means more like a 95-98% mitigation of the pandemic within a few months.
As the comment made by the other user here says, it will create more waves. Now, that the damage to the economy is greater than the cost of healthcare and lives of a pandemic, that's an opinion you're not backing with data.
Also, I might be biased because I have people in my circle who are at risk, but I think a real solution is more structured than this. Machines + mandatory gloves and masks would be certainly better.
It also doesn't solve many of the spontaneous human interactions that are hurt by this. A 13 min per person test that needs to be adminstered by somebody who knows what they are doing works fine in a factory. It probably is still too much friction for a restaurant, the subway, a stadium, kid's soccer practice, etc.
Still not perfect, but this could be a workaround.
And yes, you would have to be re-tested regularly.
If you get tested by an authority - a doctor - then there is only so much discussion to be had. Whereas if you are asked to test yourself in the morning, who's going to be able to verify your claimed outcome?
Consider STD's and - in particular - HIV. Even with medical testing, the first basic lesson any teenager (should) get(s) is to use a condom if you don't know your partner.
Moreover, it's a good thing that many legal systems (a) only grant doctors the ability to issue sick leave and (b) protect the rights of those who are issued sick leave. Labor laws being byzantine as they are, allowing employers to test their workers at their own discretion poses a wide range of prickly legal issues.
The fact that South Korea or China (arguably) succeeded in curbing their epidemic happened because their public governance puts the collective above personal rights and people are totally fine with that because that's a deep part of the moral standard of their culture.
Current mass quarantine exercises are painful in the short term, but if you can keep them up for significant time, it might be possible to safeguard liberties and protections that aren't self-evident. You could curtail those exercises and favor self testing in order to open up the economy quicker, but doing that in a meaningful way requires that we all are prepared to compromise on some of those protections and rights, with all the unintended societal consequences that might bring.
I kind of disagree with that point. South Korea has succeeded in curbing the virus so far because, in large part, they are simply better prepared. To give a quick historical context, they suffered another (much smaller) coronavirus called MERS not too long ago (2015) and they ran into similar problems that many countries are now dealing with. So they spent the last 4-5 years improving their regulation (eg, quicker KFDA approval), logistics/supply chain (eg, testing kits development, distribution), and legal/public policy (eg, privacy and public disclosure) and preparing for the next virus outbreak.
So, for instance, we hear a lot about their high-tech, big-data driven tracking system (using personal GPS, credit cards data) to identify hotspots/potential contacts and isolate further infections -- that didn't exist 5 years ago during the MERS outbreak because it was thought to be intrusive and violated individual rights. The intrusive search and diagnosis strategy employed today was born out of necessity; normally not permissible under their moral or cultural code.
https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/south-korea-learned-its-succ...
As long as a large majority of people do the right thing, and report / self isolate if positive, a few people cheating here and there probably won't be enough to affect the course of the disease.
We need to remove incentives to cheat. I don't see much stigmatization of people with the disease in the USA, so that's not a worry. The biggest problem is economic, lost paychecks. We should probably require companies to allow sick leave for coronavirus, and have taxpayers pick up the tab for now.
The test device generates a QR code you can print or screenshot, and the inspector can scan that and it's either a device-signed message or a link to a repository which would say "this test was performed by machine 123456 at 2020-04-23 10:00:20, result negative"
If someone aims to defraud the system by having someone else take the test for them, or by forging the submission system, there's probably some fraud-related legal recourse.
To quote from Abbott's press release: "delivering positive results in as little as five minutes and negative results in 13 minutes."
I'm all for fast approvals and faster testing, but let's not make this sound like it's going to be the equivalent of popping into the McDonald's drive-thru for coffee. You can drive a truck through the loop hole of "as little as...."
I think this will help, but I am not sure that an Abbott press-release deserves the breathless praise that you're giving it.
Reagents for SARS-Cov-2 testing are in short supply. How is this better in that area compared to the new Danish test that doesn't use those reagents at all?
The end of the pandemic, even with this, is still going to be a lot more complicated. Zooming out a bit:
The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.
It depends, for a start, on making a vaccine. If this were a flu pandemic, that would be easier. The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch. The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said.
But it’s also the fastest step among many subsequent slow ones.
From https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-.... That's the optimistic case per Ed Yong.
You acknowledge you're looking at an optimistic scenario. I hope everything breaks as smoothly as you imagine.
Looking at the record of the US Federal response thus far, if anything like this level of optimism was warranted, we almost assuredly wouldn't be in the mess we are at the moment.
http://www.pharmatechsolutions.co/assets/inserts/20200318_Ge...
I ask because I saw articles about rapid tests (a few hours for a result) claiming accuracy of 98% plus in South Korea. I’m not saying the info isn’t out there, I just haven’t seen it, there is too much crap flying around.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/business/china-coronaviru...
"Spanish medical experts, who have examined the 9,000 kits delivered last week, said they have only a 30 percent probability of detecting the virus."
https://www.voanews.com/science-health/coronavirus-outbreak/...
"The news comes following complaints from Spain that about 70 percent of the kits it purchased were too inaccurate to be used to diagnose patients who were sick and stuck in emergency rooms."
https://www.foxnews.com/world/china-launches-investigation-i...
"Up to 80 percent of the 150,000 portable, quick coronavirus test kits China delivered to the Czech Republic earlier this month were faulty, according to local Czech news site Expats.cz."
https://news.yahoo.com/china-supplied-faulty-coronavirus-tes...
From the first link,
> the company that made the test kits, Shenzhen Bioeasy Biotechnology, had not been on Beijing’s list of certified providers
> Spanish health officials said they bought the tests from an unnamed third-party distributor
Furthermore, the Spanish health officials used the test wrong,
> In a statement on social media, Bioeasy said that Spanish officials did not understand how to conduct the test and that it made videos and issued instructions to help them.
They(WHO) recommended them to buy covid fast tests. They did not. The Gov expected "one or two cases" so why the fuss?
So instead other countries(after having the same meeting with WHO) did it taking good quality test out of the market. Those are high accuracy.
But the Government of Spain waited for 9th of March to act because they wanted Women's manifestation to happen,the 8th of March, which for both parties in the Govertment(socialist and communist) was a priority over anything else(in order to show how progressive they were).
Waiting for so long meant the illness went out of control. It was too late for controlling it and a week later they recognized the problem.
So when they wanted to act they panicked and there was no good quality stock in the market, they bought what they could.
When the test kits came, they distributed to hospitals and the first thing they did was testing the kits, given the fact that they already have ill people and PCR machines(that give the results after hours or days).
They got an accuracy of just 30%, so the kits could not be used. It has been in any newspaper front page in Spain(El Español, El Pais[those are socialist so they are extra kind to the Gov], El Mundo).
So the order was cancelled.
If you know Spanish, it is extremely simple search:"test defectuosos". For example:
https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20200326/48103902679/emaba...
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-incuba...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/decn-finalizes-fda-pre-eua-14...
No, that's a serological antibody test. They are useful, but they only work once your body has already mounted a response to the virus.
In contrast, PCR tests looks for the actual viral RNA, and they work regardless of what your immune system is doing. In principle, the test I described could do likewise: it identifies the actual virus particles in the same way the (mouse) immune system does: by keying into them with antibodies which in turn trigger a larger response (the voltage).
Unless they are somehow using a glucose meter to monitor more blood than a finger stick?
I’m not doubting that you could have a test that worked by scanning for Coronavirus antigen in blood. But not with the device described here. But even assuming it worked, I don’t see how it would be better than an RNA amplification test.
It’s less of a biological problem and more of a statistical sampling problem. The chances of there being a CoV antigen in the small drop of blood that you’d measure with a glucose monitor is very small. Sure, it might work, and the theory behind the device is sound. However, if you had a negative test, you’d never know if it was because you didn’t have CoV or if you just didn’t have any in that small blood sample.
I’d be happy to be wrong about this. A quick blood check as opposed to a 15min (the Abbott test) or 24hr (to 1 week with this backlog) wait would be amazing. But the amount of validation you’d need to demonstrate effectiveness would be equally amazing.
Given that the above test is some random marketing PDF and I haven't heard anyone respectable talk about this mechanism, I don't have much faith in it, so that is consistent with your analysis.
https://www.amazon.com/GenUltimate-Blood-Glucose-Strips-Mete...
I was super impressed by this 18 year old, but the company is 18 years old.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/decn-finalizes-fda-pre-eua-14...
Looks like this is a Korean developed test. Pretty cool.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/decn-finalizes-fda-pre-eua-14...
https://www.ssi.dk/aktuelt/nyheder/2020/03-ssi-loeser-stort-...
(in danish)
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/covid-19-coronavirus-pan...
There's some discussion in NY State about NYC hospitals having developed a test that's currently in use.
1. https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/emergency-situations-med... ; look for "What serology tests are being offered under the policy outlined in Section IV.D of the Policy for Diagnostic Tests for Coronavirus Disease-2019?"
> MELVILLE, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 26, 2020-- Henry Schein, Inc. (Nasdaq: HSIC) announced today the availability of an antibody rapid blood test, known as Standard Q COVID-19 IgM/IgG Rapid Test
...
> The Company anticipates having at least several hundred thousand tests available by March 30 and significantly increased availability beginning in April 2020.
...
> Because serology tests measure antibodies, they can help assess the likelihood of past as well as present infection, and are meant to be used as an aid to health care professionals in diagnosing the mid- to later stages of the viral infection. Along with other information, such as the presence of symptoms, the tests may help health care professionals assess whether individuals (including health care workers) have recovered from the virus.
From http://investor.henryschein.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
[1] https://www.alere.com/en/home/product-details/id-now-influen...
[2] https://jcm.asm.org/content/58/3/e01611-19
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicking_enzyme_amplification_r...
either way i haven’t seen ROC, precision/recall, d’, or F1 scores either.
Like that device from a few days ago that could test 1000 people in a day...on 100 machines.
Only if you have no virus (covid, cold, or otherwise) you leave the house.
This is especially important for nurses, doctors, etc.
a side question is how a guy living alone, ordering deliveries, managing to get a cold... it must have been the deliveries.
However, everybody seems focused on a test designed specifically for Covid-19 which means the economy will remain shut down for months to come.
More importantly, almost adults are permanently infected with viruses like EBV. And there are genes like Arc that seem to be descended from retroviral genes. So what do you test for?
Did you make a typo or am I unfamiliar with that symbol?
I know they are up to 100k tests per day which is supposed to go up to 150k next week.
That's a really serious problem. A fast test would be much more useful.
Of course, there are other equipment problems. N95 masks, PPE equipment, ventilators.
And there's the problem of creating more quarantine areas where the infected can go and not infect their families and friends. There's problem of making the lockdowns tighter and more rational (grocery stores should be forced to do curbsite service, perhaps with grants from the state. The state could contract with Instacart also). There's the problem of more people doing contact tracing. There's the problem of prevent landlords and others from evicting and harassing health care workers (for possibly carrying the virus). There are many problems but arguing about "where the focus needs to be" seems counter-productive. All of this stuff crucial.
Some people, grocery store workers and emergency workers are expected to be working. If you could test such workers as they show up at work, these work places would be much safer.
The "shelter in place" order is pretty as leaky as a sieve to be honest - people are still buying groceries at crowded stores because they don't have a choice. So yeah, if you could really confine everyone for three weeks, the problem would go away quicker but now, when that's not really what's happening, tests as a tool seem useful.
From what I understand it’s the asymptomatic cases that are the problem, and they’re not getting tested anyway.
When you have a ten minute test, why not test asymptomatic people?
Plus also, we need to be working hard now so we have testing, contract tracing and quarantine method available later, when they are need to "mop up" the remaining cases.
But since that's not feasible, the alternative is to test as early as possible and hard-quarantine immediately -- by testing everyone constantly and everywhere, for which you really need sufficiently real-time results.
Right now, with soft-quarantine,the virus is still spreading, and the timer refreshing -- as soon as people are out and about again, rates will spike up again. Soft-quarantine is a delaying tactic (smoothening the curve), but not a solution.
But we also can't soft-quarantine for that long, because it's crushing the economy. If we keep doing it, there won't be much to go back to.
You need a test, and a fast one, or you don't have much
I'll admit that this is a hard one to explain; I've gone through a bunch of drafts for this comment.
There is a 3-5 week (1-2 weeks incubation, 1-3 weeks to resolve the symptoms) lag between infection and conclusion of the disease. So all the statistical information available to the people responding to an outbreak is weeks out of date.
They (government bodies coordinating the response) don't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting ahead of an exponential process with a doubling time of ~4 days if they only have 3-5 week old information. They need sub-24 hour feedback on what is going on. Once that is in place, targeted & proactive methods can be deployed that are less crippling than turning off entire cities.
With fast testing you can control a pandemic BEFORE it gets out of control, like South Koread did. You control every single passenger an the border, at airports, so it does not spread to general population.
If there is someone who is not detected, when you do you control the people in their environment.
Making millions of people stay at home is a FAILURE of the system. You should control hundreds or thousands, not millions.
If we had widely available, quick, accurate testing then maybe we wouldn't need everyone to be isolating no matter what. Perhaps we still would need to for a few weeks, but not for months which would be a significant improvement.
Testing helps us see the problem and deal with it before we step in it and spread it around.
Isolating is like putting the roomba on a shelf for a while. Without taking that step, no amount of turning on the lights will save you.
Both strategies are important and complementary.
There are already tests that can do it in 1-2 hours and without reagents that are running out. I know at least Denmark and Spain is using it (it is made in Denmark but it is published openly).
Let entrepreneurs, doctors, and patients decide their individual risk level. I would rather have more options than less.
Edit: as an alternative to any knee jerk critism (I said "some"), why can't states handle this and the best emerge? I'm a big proponent of localism.
Like you could have looser requirements to enter the market and then penalize/ban companies/people that make bad/unsafe tests. (yes, I'm proposing that people involved in marketing useless medical tests be banned from doing it a second time. Might be hard to structure it, but the goal is clear enough).
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/06/21/we...
And let’s see if my nastier, more cynical Derek-Against-Humanity prediction comes true: that the next wave will not be just people who have seized on this plan opportunistically, but who have targeted it right from the start. Who will pick out terrible diseases for which there are no therapies at all, the better to insure a supply of completely desperate patients and families, and provide them with utterly useless therapies at stiff, stiff prices. Utterly harmless therapies, though – don’t want to get sued while you’re raking in the bucks. I’m talking polysaccharide therapy for pancreatic cancer, antioxidant phytonutrients for Alzheimer’s: in other words, corn starch and grape juice. What the hell. The customers are going to die, anyway. Why should they die with their money as well?
Is that really so bad in 2020, when we have access to the information we actually need to learn about snake oil?
I'm usually all for individual responsibility, but health is one of the rare things where you can't just rely on people being rational. It is very difficult to expect rational decision making based on evidence when it comes to a dying cancer patient desperate to find a cure. And it's very easy to see people profit from that.
Zero efficacy times a thousand equals...
That seems like a bad example to support your point. Nigerian scammers don't strike at random like lightning. If you aren't really stupid or really greedy, there is zero chance that you'll get scammed by those guys. They target people with poor cognitive abilities and people who are greedy enough to think they can scam the scammers.
They run dragnets looking for the rare individuals who vulnerable to their scheme. They are powerless if tasked to target a specific person unless that specific person by chance happens to be the sort of person their scheme works on.
But should we expect the FDA itself to be immune to such manipulations?
I will repeatedly and loudly criticize the US government response to COVID-19 so far as inept, particularly the FDA in the early days. Brittle laws combined with their failure to move quickly hamstrung our chance at containment.
Under normal circumstances though, health and safety oriented regulatory bodies such as the FDA play an absolutely essential role in protecting us from bad actors. The only reason I have confidence when purchasing medications of any sort is because of them. They also protect our food supply from all sorts of misguided and dangerous production practices.
Even in an emergency situation, they have an essential role to play in preventing bad actors from popping up left and right peddling snake oil. There certainly needed to be more flexibility and speed in responding to the current crisis, and I'd argue that states ought to have _significantly_ more autonomy in a number of areas, but that's a far cry from calling them irrelevant.
(As an aside, I was disappointed that none of the states defied the federal government in this instance. I had hoped for a state-level authorization for established medical labs to develop in house tests, and a subsequent court case challenging federal law on the matter. As far as I understand, the FDA only derives its authority from the frequently abused interstate commerce clause.)
If I want to treat my (illegal war) PTSD, depression or anxiety with novel treatments like 2CB, LSD, or MDMA, that is my choice. It immoral to restrict my supply with the barrel of a gun.
That's exactly what makes them the most vulnerable. They are, in extreme conditions, desperate for a medicine and they'll lose sense because of that.
The fallacy that patients cannot act rationally in the face of adversity is a common excuse for compulsory regulatory bodies. While there is value in having a centralized body like the FDA provide consumers with qualified advice on drugs and food, a certification authority can provide that information for individuals to use at their own prerogative.
If you want that policy to change, it'll have to happen at the voting booth, not because some FDA bureaucrat decided it.
Yeah, seriously. Every state is happy to defy DEA with marijuana. You'd have near universal support for defying FDA in this instance, and it would be a welcome breath of fresh air for the states, who have honestly been continuously disempowered by the federal government.
Does it though? There's a perception that government agencies are impartial watchdogs, but this belies the reality that governments have agendas of their own. The FDA is so politically removed from the people it was created to ostensibly protect that there's now little incentive for it to relieve real suffering today. A brief example:
My brother and thousands of people suffer from type-1 diabetes. We have had the technology for years now to create an artificial pancreas, but FDA and EMA regulatory procedures have stopped any device from being sold. People are creating their own DIY systems because no commercial, professionally-developed, reasonably-priced alternative exists yet.
This isn't snake oil. There are solutions for many people's ailments available today. And the FDA is a massive giant standing in the way of people living healthier, unencumbered lives.
Treat people like adults. On the whole they're pretty good at figuring out what's best for themselves and taking care of each other.
Is it fair to die in State X because it had more inept leaders than State Y? This isn't about long term economic or social policy, this is about an exponentially growing pandemic that doesn't respect borders.
Yes, which is to say it isn't fair. You're example argues for higher level oversight and uniformity of regulation, say at the EU level, not even more balkanization of them.
The big difference here is that the speed of finding the right drug can make or break trillions of dollars and thousands of lives, so it's critical for the FDA to focus on the COVID-19 illness.
Try starting with something less dangerous first like rolling your own ciphers for use in end-to-end encryption.
And consider the current circumstances: Yes, things are relaxed in an emergency. How would that be any different? State-level, or any level of oversight, would also be relaxed in an emergency. All that shows is that sensitivity to risk changes (decreases) when there is a crisis. It doesn't invalidate the greater level of care taken when there is the time to take it.
Also, no matter what level you impose oversight & regulation, patients will not be in a position to determine their desired level of risk. If it happens at the state level, there can still be plenty of people who would like a different risk threshold: They won't get it though.
Finally, it ignores the fact that what might be in the best interest of a more local jurisdiction (say, it costs less money) it might be very much against the best interests of others. A jurisdiction that decides it's comfortable with higher risk does not exist in a vacuum: It's comfort with higher risk would also bleed over into neighboring areas.
Far better to have a uniform set of guidelines and make exceptions on a case by case basis in emergencies, rather than make everything an exception, which would make coordination & consistency during a crisis a complete nightmare.
Can anyone tell me why this is any better than the already demonstrated, very accurate, testing methods already in place? Is it just a company IP type of thing?
What does it matter that we can get a result before we leave the test site, versus a few hours after we go home, eat some lunch, and do a little work?
Maybe I’m overthinking it. Great. Please, Abbot, manufacture these things as fast as freaking possible. Distribute them across the whole country in huge volume. But I can’t help feel like this article (on Abbot’s own website no less) is just a bunch of sales/ marketing BS.
Honestly, it mostly just pisses me off that an American company as big & powerful as Abbot, didn’t have these things ready to go from the get go. There should have been thousands of these available to every Governor in the country at least a month ago.
Maybe then, our leaders (in the USA) would have had the capacity to craft smarter policies. Instead almost every governor in the country just threw blind, blanket lockdowns over entire states. Never mind that rural areas were not experiencing the same rates of infection, or pressure on health care systems, as densely populated cities.
They probably just didn’t have data pints they needed to decide. So they treated everyone the same. Much to the detriment of smaller, rural regions.
I'm not sure if it is really necessary either but mentally I'm at the point where I think we should just fire all available bullets at this thing, as they become available.
It seems like a great idea in theory, but in practice? I’m not so sure.
Considering you can have the disease and present no symptoms but be contagious, you’d have to test everyone. I guess it is better than nothing in some cases.
You're complaining that a 15 minute covid test is just too much?
I am not complaining. I'm speculating on the usefulness of thi s given that there is already a fair bit of overhead with boarding a plane in 2020 as opposed to say getting on a train.
There are a LOT of flights that happen each day, If you add up all the time combined, this would actually add a bit of overhead to an already rather long airport check-in process.
Not to mention the obvious which is that, if flights are still running at full pace, well you still have a lot of potentially infected people gathering in a rather confined area (airport), which is not really a good idea anyway.
This is obviously useful for something like triaging at a hospital, will wee see it at a check-in gate or at a bus stop? I doubt it.
Also that's clearly a lie it will take less time than for you to take off your belt, it clearly says it takes up to 15 minutes for a result. Don't talk nonsense.
Flights are getting cancelled already, and some countries closed their airports at all. There are places where you can get stuck at a border crossing, or a roadblock if you have no proof of a recent medical checks. On this background any tests which add 15 min, or even 1 hr overhead sounds more like a solution, not a problem.
It’s not 15 mins from the time you get swabbed. It’s 15 once it’s prepared and put in the machine. Then there will be cleanup time after. Either way, even if you could run them through assembly line style every 15 minutes, 1 machine would take a whole 24 hours to process 100 people.
Another commenter @nkrumm pointed out multiple good use cases. I think they will be used to allow health care workers to make rapid decisions, for specific patients, likely in emergency situations. Not to process large volumes.
That's excellent compared to inability to leave an area, or forced two weeks quarantine upon arrival, isn't?
Better than nothing, but I wouldn't get too excited yet.
These are for on the spot, emergency or very urgent, situations where particular patients care decisions will be determined by a rapid result.
That’s a pretty long customs line.
To add to that, at a accuracy rate of 99% there will be about 75 people who will go through with the wrong diagnosis unless retests are done, which will add extra time. I really don’t see this working out at that scale.
You’d really need a sub 60 second test for this to scale.
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-th...
- Patients needing emergent surgery while also presenting with symptoms concerning for COVID-19.
- Critical healthcare workers (physicians, nurses needing rule out and rapid return to work)
- Patients presenting who may have contributed to exposure of other high risk individuals (to speed up time of tracing)
Your other points are valid.
Maybe I’m just too sour and frustrated with the whole situation in the USA, and had to vent a little bit, my fault :(
This does actually sound like nice technology where they can pump out test results from this little appliance sized device on site.
Other rapid (result in hours) I’ve read about still require sending specimens to a remote lab. Let’s just hope they can manufacture them like crazy, and quickly get them to the health workers that need them most.
At the risk of sounding snarky... Really? You can't think of any way in which a 5-15 min result is more valuable than a multi-hour/day result? We have governors setting up roadblocks at state borders to turn away out-of-state license plates; a quick test seems like it might help there. Then think about what that means for international flights.
@mkrumm schooled me on multiple valid use cases and, I think, outlined how these things will actually be used.
They seem to allow medical professionals to be able to make rapid, urgent decisions, about specific patients or cases. Most likely in emergency situations. I doubt they can be used assembly line style to process large volumes of tests, so I’m afraid things like testing a whole plane flight or a big group of people waiting at a roadblock are not very feasible.
One of the ways to "rule out" COVID is to confirm it's something else. Someone with the symptoms you describe would, at the very least, get an EKG and some blood work to confirm it wasn't a heart attack.
If everyone could do that we can live with this virus.
We don’t have to run and hide from it in our homes. We can go back to a normal life, while waiting for a vaccine that can take years.
This is useful because it forms part of triage. You come in, to ER/A&E, do the test along with the history.
When you get seen by a doctor you have the results of the test and can plan accordingly.
same goes here, as part of the history taking you can get a test to see if they have CV or something else.
Abbot is doing something at least. This article is indeed marketing material though. It makes me wonder how quickly this form of testing could be deployed across populations if IP was not enforced.
Edit: I agree with your other points, although currently I feel lucky to have a pretty good governor.