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

201–210 of 237 posts

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

#201

Post by masonic »

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 infection is at the lung while the swabs are done to the upper respiratory tract.
That's not particularly relevant, given that anal swabs are more accurate than oral swabs.

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

#202

Post by fspeech »

masonic wrote: post #201
fspeech wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 infection is at the lung while the swabs are done to the upper respiratory tract. That's not particularly relevant, given that anal swabs are more accurate than oral swabs.

ACE2 receptors, through which the virus infects the cells, are highly expressed in parts of the lung and the digestive tract. They are not in the upper respiratory tract however. The accuracy of the swab test depends on the amount of viral material coughed up in the sputum.

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

#203

Post by cma »

partiallypro wrote: post #87
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-…

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'…

I believe they run the tests multiple times and get more accuracy from the repeated runs.

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

#204

Post by alasdair_ »

zaroth wrote: post #115
IIAOPSW wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one have full faith in the United States government to handle the situation competently and expediently. Facetiousness aside, that doesn't sound like the CDC. "Hide the numbers even from ourselves and hope it goes away" is the antithesis of what a scientist stands for. No way someone at the CDC wants that as official policy. But you know who has tons of influence over policy, an estranged relation with objectiv…

The CDC screwed up the tests all by themselves, even the final primers they are using are questionable. Combined with the FDA blocking local labs from testing based on bad regulations, the government screwed up the initial response just fine without any help from Trump. Trump says anyone who wants to be tested can get tested and the CDC says they just shipped a couple million test kits around the country. As usual, d…

>The CDC screwed up the tests all by themselves

This was AFTER Trump fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 and completely failed to replace them AND replaced a whole bunch of competent people at the CDC with FAR less competent people, just because they happened to be loyal to him.

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

#205

Post by cma »

D2187645 wrote: post #177
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…

Us has 55x+ cases according to the arcgis john hopkins tracker. 70 workers at the nursing home alone have symptoms now.

And I believe the asymptomatic workers are continuing working, without test results (at least as of yesterday). Hopefully they have PPE.

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

#206

Post by pandaman »

jacobolus wrote: post #156
wintorez wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/04/no-trump-...

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

#207

Post by fspeech »

kalium_xyz wrote: post #160
fspeech wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

The key point is information (more precisely "mutual information"). A positive test gives you information that says you have it while a coin toss tells you nothing.

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

#208

Post by lern_too_spel »

joe_the_user wrote: post #176
lern_too_spel wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Korea now is effectively the lowest fatality rate for any of the effected countries which points to excellent surveillance and treatment. I darn well intent to keep pointing to this. That's misleading. Korea has the highest active case ratio of any of the hardest hit countries. The flip side of the lowest CFR coin is that Korea also has by far the lowest recovery rate of any of those countries. You need to wait…

I don't know what the criteria for recovery is. My impression is there isn't much of a international standard and so the inter-country comparisons aren't that useful. Iran might have a higher recovery rate but that might be more an artifact of how they measure this. In all other measure, South Korea is doing well. Avoiding death is much unambiguous a measure. Edit: Yes, because Korea has experienced an exponential in…

> Edit: Yes, because Korea has experienced an exponential increase in cases, most cases in Korea are "new" but this is true for most other countries - though countries where they only find cases by people dying might be different but not in a good way.

That is the whole point of my comment. There are many countries that would appear to be even better than Korea by your naive interpretation of CFR. Germany, India, Russia, Brazil, Iceland, Mexico, and many other countries have 0% CFR. That just means that like in Korea, the infected haven't had time enough to die.

Once again, "You need to wait for the active cases to turn into deaths or recoveries."

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

#209

Post by jacobolus »

pandaman wrote: post #206
jacobolus wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/04/no-trump-...

That is about a different claim, related to efforts by the US to help developing countries respond to pandemics.

He absolutely did dump everyone in the pandemic command chain in NSC/DHS, and then not replace them. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

When recently asked about this and his proposals to defund the CDC by the press, he said in response “I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having thousands of people around when you don’t need them. When we need them, we can get them back very quickly.”

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

#210

Post by pandaman »

jacobolus wrote: post #209
pandaman wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/04/no-trump-...

That is about a different claim, related to efforts by the US to help developing countries respond to pandemics. He absolutely did dump everyone in the pandemic command chain in NSC/DHS, and then not replace them. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/ When recently asked about this and his proposals to defund the CDC by the press, he said in response “I’m a businessperson. I don’t like having th…

Luckily, we have an entire agency dedicated to pandemics - CDC and the article I linked assures that CDC has not been defunded.
Post reply on HN