Googling for "romer covid 19" should turn up a lot of news sources covering the notion of testing millions of people a day.
That's because we currently aren't capable of testing everyone who is obviously sick just once. If we got there, we wouldn't even be close to being capable of testing key personnel (like health care workers). If we got there we wouldn't even be close to being able to test everyone once. If we got there we wouldn't even be close to being able to test everyone every day.
You haven't heard any advocating for OR against it because it is so far from achievable that it isn't worth considering.
The linked article suggests a novel and much cheaper test, which would be great. But even if that didn't work out, what scale could possibly be feasible with existing tests? Pre-shortage, an RT-PCR seemed to be much cheaper than a missed day of work.
Testing a few hundred people daily would be doable, as Germany has relatively good testing capacity - probably one main reason for the overall better handling of the pandemic so far. But the concept still gets critisized, as this would mean a fast track to testing for the players while parts of the population don't have equal access to testing.
For the whole population, it would be a good first step to be test really everyone who has any assumptions of symptoms and some time later, everyone in contact. And perhaps a biweekly test for the general population.
That seems like the logical conclusion of "more testing" to me. If we could, why wouldn't we?
3blue1brown on YouTube did an analysis which similarly shows that fast quarantining is the best way to mitigate the virus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs
IIRC, mainstream objections tend to come from concerns of false positives, since that becomes a bigger problem with this frequent level of testing and could prove a huge disruption if you end up with too many quarantine still, or so many that testing positive becomes essentially meaningless in terms of telling you whether you have the disease or not if you test positive.
https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/coronavirus-testi...
Being off work for such should not result in severe reduction in income unless your income was already high; at least that is the case here in Norway where laid off personnel get 80% of their normal salary up to a limit that is above average salary.
Edit: typos
That's demonstrably false. There are numerous prominent examples in fact.
Taiwan is not doing a high rate of testing at all, they're most certainly not doing constant ubiquitous testing. Their per capita test rate is 1/7 that of the US.
Singapore and South Korea are not doing constant ubiquitous testing. The US has already tested at a higher rate than South Korea and will pass Singapore shortly given the continued ramp in US testing. Both are held up as marvels of virus containment.
Japan has barely done any testing. They're seeing a small spike in cases now, however they were not earlier (this is four plus months after the outbreak began and Japan is next to China). Their deaths from Covid are commonly 1/50 to 1/150 the per capita rate of the US and other higher outbreak nations, while doing 1/10 to 1/15 the testing. The only explanation is either that they're covering up ten thousand deaths, or the other non-testing approaches they've utilized work well. Compare Japan to Germany on Covid deaths - again, despite Japan being next to China - and then look at the testing rates. Now explain that.
Finland is testing below the US rate and has contained the outbreak to a stellar degree. That's because Helsinki is colder than Stockholm and Copenhagen. The same reason Moscow didn't get slammed until more recently as the weather began to warm up. There are other factors that impact the spread of the virus, including the rate of social activity and high temperatures (over ~60F / ~15.5C). We know this from several studies that have proven the role of temperature in the spread of SARS and SARS-CoV-2; as well as understanding how the spread benefits from greater social activity (which doesn't occur at the same rate in super cold climates).
Greece has a very low number of Covid deaths and no evidence of serious outbreak this entire time. Their testing rate is 1/3 that of the US. And they're wedged between Turkey and Italy. Much like southern Italy, they've been heavily shielded by their climate. Nobody wants to talk about this of course, it's the Mexico / Texas / San Diego / Baghdad / Lagos effect in action.
Iraq isn't seeing any consequential outbreak, thanks to its climate. Whereas Iran right next door got smashed, because Tehran has an entirely different climate from Baghdad.
Thailand and Vietnam are both testing at a very low rate, and there has been zero evidence of serious outbreaks in either country, despite the proximity to China. That's thanks to their hotter climates.
Nigeria is barely testing at all, with zero evidence of a consequential outbreak there. No crushing of their healthcare system with cases or deaths; no huge spike in deaths, hospitalizations or ICU cases. There are numerous countries across Africa seeing similar low outbreak results, with very little testing.
Colombia isn't seeing a consequential outbreak, their testing rate is super low. They're not seeing a healthcare crush either. They've contained it so far without a high rate of testing.
India and Pakistan were supposed to get buried by SARS-CoV-2 cases. It hasn't happened, week after week goes by and the predictions continue to fail to come true. They're barely doing any testing at all. There's zero evidence in either country of a massive outbreak or crushing number of ICU cases swamping their healthcare systems. It's because of how hot their cities are. I've yet to see a single other good explanation for why India isn't buried in Covid deaths by now. India isn't seeing the virus hit for the same reason Africa hasn't.
Egypt is barely doing any testing. Cairo should have millions of cases of the virus and a huge number of deaths by now. They should have 20,000 dead people from Covid at this point just in Cairo. Where is it? The Cairo metro has 20 million people. It's not far from Italy, Turkey, or Iran. Guess what? It's very hot in Cairo.
And if you want to see a belligerent demonstration of the climate impact in action: tell me that Florida has been dramatically more responsible in their behavior than Belgium has (or France, or Italy, or Spain, or the UK, or the Netherlands, or Switzerland), to warrant having a per capita Covid mortality rate 1/12th that of Belgium. If Florida had New York's climate, Florida would have 20k Covid deaths by now. Instead they have a mere 1,066 (and Florida has a lot of old people) despite doing almost everything wrong.
If "it happened and it worked" isn't "mainstream" then I don't know what is.
1) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-04-23/wuhan-s-r...
Johnson and Johnson have already started scaling their vaccine and plan to have 1 billion doses available by January 2021. If their vaccine is approved, it will be an instant solution and better than testing everyone every day.
Moderna has also started the process of scaling their solution as well but J&J have a head start and a known platform.
Why not? Scaling a test is a completely separate exercise to scaling a vaccine, and it has the advantage that multiple proven working tests exit now, they just need to be scaled. Both can be done, by different people.
You might also find that having a vaccine and a test is better than having just a vaccine.
> If their vaccine is approved
Multiple vaccines are in development. This is not a situation where we should stop doing X now because Y _might_ happen in 8 months or more time. None of the vaccines are guaranteed to be ready and working and scaled at any given date. None of them.
How does your device detect viruses? Is it based on a protein or the RNA or what?
Given that it appears people with COVID-19 can shed the disease for many days before showing any symptoms, if your goal is to pinch off outbreaks before they become outbreaks, frequent, universal testing is the only way to get there.
"Quantity has a quality all it's own"
The two solutions that are being debated now are (1) staying in lockdown until a vaccine or treatment is available, and (2) reopening and attempting to manage the spread using existing protocols/ideas (relatively low amounts of testing, quarantining after a period of infectiousness, some form of contact tracing, lots of finger crossing). At least, that's generally what I hear being debated: reopen or not, or when to reopen.
The post suggests that if we had quantitatively much more testing, we could pick a qualitatively different third solution -- namely, reopen pretty freely and realistically control the spread.
Sure, you can view that as a variant of the "reopen" option, but in my mind reopening feels very different with a realistic way to isolate people before they've had a chance to spread it very far. It's proactive vs reactive. If we fully reopen with even 2 orders of magnitude more testing than we're currently doing, it's just going to be a matter of closing back up wherever it gets out of hand. In practice, the openness will fluctuate, things will be spread out over time, politicians will continue to do the exact wrong things, and lots of people will continue to die.
In short: (1) stay in lockdown until vaccine/treatment, (2) reopen without a strategy, (3) reopen with a strategy.
> This test gives results in ten minutes using a small amount of saliva which is taken into a disposable tube and then run through a scanner.
> We’re planning to start operating the first scanner within a month. If all goes well, there will be millions of scanners deployed by this fall, ensuring that every school and essential business can reopen while remaining safe and virus-free.
One of the oldest and largest biomedical institutes, the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, recently had a few press releases, urging for tests for at least ALL respiratory tract infections.
What one of the leading experts, Prof. Drosten, also mentioned is that current (PCR) tests have considerable false positives. The effect of such FP at large scale can hardly be estimated.
I really hope that you are able to find a solution and can bring up a scalable and reliable solution, after the promises. If not, there will only remain the impression that this could be a Silicon Valley type of talk the walk, as people heard it from other companies in the past.
Some people just advocate for isolating the elderly and having everyone else mingle.
The life expectancy loss from just letting it run its course would be less than a tenth of the life expectancy difference between the second and third wealth quartiles in the USA. And if we aren't worried about that difference, then why are we imposing a quality of life reduction that's much larger than the quality of life difference between those two quartiles for a much smaller gain in life expectancy? (similarly the economic costs of bringing the lowest quartile up a year or two would be much lower than the cost of this lockdown)
Because that's a terrible idea that doesn't make any sense. I understand the logic and why it's tempting, and I've even read some of the evidence supposedly backing it up. I find it thoroughly unconvincing.
I won't address the moral side, just the practical.
The virus disproportionately effects the elderly, yes, but far from exclusively. We have seen the non-elderly death rates with distancing in effect. If we could confidently say that >70% of the non-elderly population already had the virus, then this might make some sense. But since at the moment we cannot say that, then this is a method for quickly getting to >90% of the population, and killing off an unknown but far from trivial percentage of us.
Also, I have seen some evidence that the magnitude of symptoms is partly dependent on the degree of exposure. If that is the case, I really really do not want to be sitting between two infectious people in a movie theater or sports arena. But this would be commonplace with the whole "let's just sacrifice the elderly" approach.
As a society we have shown time and time again that we only care about "disasters", not the continuous but far greater and less expensively solved losses. Nuclear power vs coal, air plane accidents vs car accidents, the life expectancy reduction of poverty vs COVID-19...