Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 237 posts

Re: Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

#151

Post by pneill »

timmytokyo wrote: post #149
pneill wrote: post #74

What’s the point of testing? There is no treatment. So knowing you have it or not is pointless. If you have it, and it’s serious, you’ll seek medical attention regardless of whether you know it or not. When you see the ridiculous on hand sanitizer and toilet paper, even if there was an over the counter version, you wouldn’t be able to find one in the store.

1. To give epidemiologists and public health officials a better picture of how widespread the virus is. 2. To make it more likely that infected persons isolate themselves to avoid spreading the virus further.

They get that data the same way they always do, from people seeking medical attention. People who are symptomatic for anything ( flu, cold, etc) should always isolate themselves.

What’s madness is asymptotic people testing themselves.

Re: Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

#152

Post by m0zg »

Daishiman wrote: post #62
m0zg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you, but nearly all governments are led by idiots who don't know anything and don't care to know. Becoming a non-idiot is hard, time consuming work that's incompatible with politics needed to get elected into a public office. At least our executive branch had enough common sense to ban flights from China on Jan 31st (and was panned by the "free press" and Democrats in congress for it at the time).…

You're already on your way to having tens of thousands of infections. But because it's absolutely false that "all governments are led by idiots", countries with good health care systems are raising awareness of the severity of the issue and taking effective measures. The US isn't a first-world country; but it is a very rich thirld-world nation.

Tens of thousands would be a great outcome actually. Tens of thousands of infections would mean only single to low double digit thousands of deaths - lower than the flu. 45 million people a year in the US suffer from the flu, and anywhere from 30 to 60 thousand die of complications. 30K dead, therefore, would be "business as usual", as strange as that sounds. Anything lower than that would be "better than usual".

Re: Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

#155

Post by m0zg »

anigbrowl wrote: post #102
m0zg wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate to break it to you, but nearly all governments are led by idiots who don't know anything and don't care to know. Becoming a non-idiot is hard, time consuming work that's incompatible with politics needed to get elected into a public office. At least our executive branch had enough common sense to ban flights from China on Jan 31st (and was panned by the "free press" and Democrats in congress for it at the time).…

Please stop with the disinformation. The govt didn't stop flights from China, it barred entry from China to non-citizens. The only reason our numbers of confirmed cases aren't much higher are due to a lack of testing. I think you know full well that just days ago Trump was saying in a press conferences that there were only 15 cases and the number would soon be zero, and likewise was saying at the CDC a couple of days…

Yes, US citizens, permanent residents, and their immediate family members can return from China, with some conditions: "Americans returning from China will be allowed into the country, but will face screening at select ports of entry and required to undertake 14 days of self-screening to ensure they don’t pose a health risk. Those returning from Hubei province, the center of the outbreak, will be subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine."

Re: Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

#156

Post by jacobolus »

wintorez wrote: post #72
joe_the_user wrote: post #43

Korea is doing drive-through testing with results available in three days. [1] That the US is still at the level of doing testing in a private and haphazard fashion is effectively criminal and seems likely to have a serious impact fairly soon. The US had a difficult time even testing all the workers at the nursing home in Washington where 11 people died.[2] [1] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-south-korea-uses-…

I think this epidemic will expose a lot of weaknesses in public health sector globally. Hopefully, we will learn valuable lessons, but I wished we didn't have to learn them at the cost of losing numerous lives.

In the USA maybe we can bring back the pandemic response command chain in the executive branch of the federal government who were all summarily fired in 2018 because the president and his national security advisor didn’t want to keep “people who sit around doing nothing most of the time” (paraphrased) on payroll.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/0...

Re: Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

#157

Post by jacobolus »

eyegor wrote: post #75

I feel torn posting this, but it seems like the US president is truly trying to go against the country's interests at every turn. The only non malicious explanation I can come up with for the covid response is a gamble in the hopes that somehow the economy will tank less if the outbreak is marginalized. So far: lack of testing, lack of screening at intl airports, lack of quarantine for the latest cruise ship, constan…

It’s not that the president wants citizens to die per se. It’s just that he is incapable of understanding/comprehending the threat we are dealing with, and is also acutely sensitive to perceived threats to his own personal fortune or reputation, which are his #1 priority in every situation.

This is a good reason to have people with basic quantitative competence (or at least folks willing to listen to experts with quantitative competence) and a certain amount of imagination in leadership roles.

Re: Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

#158

Post by [deleted] »

eyegor wrote: post #75

I feel torn posting this, but it seems like the US president is truly trying to go against the country's interests at every turn. The only non malicious explanation I can come up with for the covid response is a gamble in the hopes that somehow the economy will tank less if the outbreak is marginalized. So far: lack of testing, lack of screening at intl airports, lack of quarantine for the latest cruise ship, constan…

[deleted]

Re: Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

#159

Post by eveningcoffee »

glofish wrote: post #118
ajross wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is literally almost no data. We are barely testing at all in the US. And even if we were, the goal here isn't good science, it's preventing deaths. People who get tested "random Joe" at home and get a positive result are less likely to infect others.

Someone sitting in their house is testing themselves is not data! You are confusing data with a number that ticks up. Ha, another infected! Look DATA! The potential for misuse, abuse, panic and trouble is far bigger than you imagine. The problem here, with everyone, is that they think that the rest of the population will act like them. Take a test, then if positive but you are not showing any symptoms lay low for a w…

Counter argument.

Tests are probably not handed out without instructions about the protocol to follow (do not go to emergency, you will be sent back when you do not have severe symptoms etc). If these are not then you pointed out a clear improvement possibility, problem solved.

I think the massive usage of self tests is a very economical way to contain the outbreak.

No, I do not mean the price of the test, I mean the macro economics. Lock downs may be avoided because only infected people must be isolated but the rest can continue to function efficiently.

Even if the containment is not possible by this, it may help to slow down the spread to the level where the health care system could handle severe cases (it is going to be very difficult when spread grows out of control - https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/ff8hns/testimony_... ).

I think that not doing massive testing that is going to be only possible by self testing will create much larger harm.

Edit: the method provided by Bill Gates is not a self test. It is just a way to collect samples. The test will be still done in the lab.

Re: Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

#160

Post by kalium_xyz »

fspeech wrote: post #111
partiallypro wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone keeps pointing to the lack of availability of kits in the US without mentioning the reason. The reason is that the CDC created its own kits instead of using the WHO kits. Why did they do that? Because the WHO kits were inaccurate. Accurate diagnoses happened only ~60% of the time, basically a coin flip. In China the tests were becoming such a problem, now they basically just count anyone with symptoms. That'…

"Coin flip" would imply half of the people who don't have the disease will test positive. There is no evidence for that. It is a super inept analogy. The infection is at the lung while the swabs are done to the upper respiratory tract. There will be misses no matter how good the kits are.

The key point is in “basically” its a metaphor. The test kits have a 40% false positive and alternative test kits which may test using an entirely different method may improve this. If you think a 40% false positive is good I urge you to actually read the who guidelines which both state this information and recommend testing people multiple times over two weeks. Source is who technical guidelines for testing on their site.
Post reply on HN