Comment by earthtourist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by earthtourist | Hacker News Reader

Startup idea: make it easy for a company to pay for testing for their workforce. If every workplace had a 15 minute test required before an employee could begin work, we could get a lot of people back to work with relatively low risk.

Additionally, the same (or another) startup could make it easy for companies to pay to allow customers to be tested with a 15 minute test. I would not mind waiting outside a restauraunt or supermarket for 15 minutes while my test is run, if it means that I could enter knowing everyone else in the building is uninfected.

I imagine you would supply each business with one or more testing machines, test kits, and some number of technicians to operate the tests and test machines correctly.

The hard part is probably getting test machines/test kits while supplies are limited.

I know a guy who is trying to arrange serological testing for Union employees in the LA port area with this exact idea.

The problem is bulk ordering tests - you need a massive investment (about 750k for minimal order size of 100k tests), which he's been trying to find some philanthropic money for.

Those finger prick tests are convenient, but they only show results if your body is already producing antibodies. The really good test is an RT-PCR or RT-LAMP test, which uses a pretty invasive swab technique. It's pretty unpleasant.

Colormetric RT-LAMP is the right method for that startup (probably) because you can deploy it with pretty few resources and get rapid tests. However, it can be finicky, and isn't approved by the FDA AFAIK.

You would have to do this every day, too. Getting tested doesn't mean you are not exposed on the way home that day, or the way back to work. Also, what if you wanted to go to multiple places in the same day? You would have to be tested n-times, as you could have been infected going from one business to the other.

What I do not hear people talking about is this: Getting tested once is not enough. If you do not have COVID-19 today, it doesn't mean you are not going to have it tomorrow. The only test that can tell you that is an antibody test. Also, we don't even know yet (for sure, anyway) if people can be re-infected.

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