Hacker News Reader

Comment by subaru_shoe | Hacker News Reader

“Chief Executive Severin Schwan said on Wednesday as he prepares to launch the drugmaker’s own antibody test next month.”

chevy calls fords new car garbage.

View on HN

Based on the false positive and false negative rates of some of the tests out there, he's not wrong.

There were several tests rushed out the door. It's hard to make the right call when you can't trust the results of your test.

Uh great, then he should cite his own test's accuracy rates and the other tests' accuracy rates and let the data bear that out.

Conveniently, he refuses to say how accurate his company's own tests are...

Both my spouse and I had COVID. I say probably because we both showed the expected moderate symptoms and we both did the Roche swab test for COVID. I came back positive. My spouse, with the same symptoms and who sleeps beside me every night, came back negative. Doctor just shrugged his shoulders and said "Yeah, it seems like if you have mild or moderate symptoms, the tests are only about 60% accurate." and just worked on the assumption we both had COVID for his suggested response.

Later on, we did a blood test at local university and we both came back with positive for the antibodies. So yeah Roche needs to address their own tire fire of a test at some point.

But he still has a point.

Pushing all manners of unreliable tests will makes matters worse for everyone.

Any test will need a very high degree of reliability or you’ll end up with large numbers of people being quarantined for nothing or, worse, large numbers of people with the virus allowed to roam free as they believe they are not carrying it.

The other issue is that we don't know what concentration of antibodies is required for immunity. We know these things for other diseases, like influenza, chickenpox, etc. We have no point of reference, so we can only test for the presence of antibodies.

I think antibody tests are still likely to be useful, especially in collecting data on the pervasiveness of the disease and getting information to find out what threshold immunity occurs at. The messaging around them is rife for misuse, though.

Everyone is looking for a silver bullet, but all we can do right now is the long, slog of science to get to a place where it's truly safe to try to return to a semblance of normalcy.

Worse is people thinking they are immune based on a false positive and then engaging risky behavior.

Not in this case. My brother works for Roche and is involved in producing the tests. He told me that all tests, except the ones from Abbott, are very not accurate at this moment.

Meh, give us data or nothing. The secondhand (hearsay) of an anonymous internet identity is inadmissable in the court of my opinion.

Hearsay of an anonymous internet identity is the best you can get at this point in time. Once the tests are out in May there will be public available data.

That's actually extraordinarily rare.

Companies just say "ours is better".

That doesn't get you sued in an expensive, drawn out libel case.

That does not mean that chevy is always wrong about ford.

I came here to say this - how is this news?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com