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

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

#211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Rus…

The difference is countries widely affected by the virus; Italy and Iran. They too have exponential grow of cases and would logically lots of new cases.

Sure, countries that don't enough cases shouldn't be compared but countries with an equivalent growth pattern make sense to compare. At the same time, we can look at the total outside China fetal rate and that's about 2%, which again Korea is doing notably better than. All of this is in context of most infection being new, all of it.

Sure, CFR may not be the final rate one sees but that doesn't mean it doesn't give significant information about what's happening.

The point I've been arguing is that the Korean strategy involves finding asymptomatic cases and preventing these becoming more symptomatic cases by quarantining them, getting those exposed tested and so-forth.

One possibility is this means more of those they find are not seriously ill and won't become seriously ill and this reduces the overall CFR, which can be seen in a comparison to other nations with equivalent numbers of infections. This makes sense to me but can indeed only be verified once this whole horrible scenario plays out.

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

#212
post #53

This is really important, especially in countries where flu season is coming. At the same time, I’ve been reading papers in top journals about various clever technologies to do rapid (ie Final point, nanopore sequencers are ideal for rapid home testing, and you get the actual sequence. They are a bit too expensive unfortunately. https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-0…

How expensive are they? I don't see the price behind your link

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

#213
post #194
post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plurality

Trump got 63 million votes and Clinton got 66 million votes. GW Bush got 50.4 million votes, Gore got 50.9 million.

Yes, a plurality of electoral votes. In Congress, it's a plurality of popular votes. The point is that elected officials were not voted by as much as 50-60% of the people who showed up to vote.

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

#214
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. But foundations and philantropy also happen to be great for tax purposes.

You realize that if someone gives away X dollars, it reduces their tax liability by <X?

The HN folks love Steve Jobs, who paid himself in backdated stock options[1] to get the long term cap gains discount, and took $1/year salary to avoid paying income and social security/payroll tax.

[1] https://www.cultofmac.com/443542/steve-jobs-apple-stock-back...

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, Rus…

The difference is countries widely affected by the virus; Italy and Iran. They too have exponential grow of cases and would logically lots of new cases. Sure, countries that don't enough cases shouldn't be compared but countries with an equivalent growth pattern make sense to compare. At the same time, we can look at the total outside China fetal rate and that's about 2%, which again Korea is doing notably better tha…

> All of this is in context of most infection being new, all of it.

No. The average time to die after infection is 28 days. Korea has been testing aggressively, and 28 days ago had fewer than 50 cases, despite finding cases earlier in their development. These other countries found cases who were already infected longer. That's why they have more deaths but also why they have more recoveries. You cannot gauge effectiveness of treatment until you've given the treated time to recover or die.

> This makes sense to me but can indeed only be verified once this whole horrible scenario plays out.

This can be verified today by the lower number of recoveries.

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

#216
post #143

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'…

The links you posted don't back up your summary. The "livescience" link is a confusing story which seems to be talking about the US, CDC test: Last week, the CDC had begun to ship about 200 testing kits to labs across the U.S. and 200 more to over 30 other countries so that more facilities could conduct testing for the new coronavirus.... The CDC is working closely with the states to correct the issues in the testing…

Don't use indentation for blockquotes. HN uses indentation for non-wrapped lines non-proportional font.

Use > or " or *

> One possible explanation is the tests are accurate and the patients do not have coronavirus at the time of testing

> Alternatively, there could be a problem with the way the tests are being conducted... There has also been some discussion about whether doctors testing the back of the throat are looking in the wrong place.

> A final option is the RT-PCR test for the new coronavirus is based on flawed science.... if there is a poor match between the primer and the virus in the patient, then an infected patient could get a negative result.

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

#217
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Health insurance is good enough until surprise they don't want to cover you or you get surprise bills in the mail from the hospital. Constantly amazed this can be a thing in a first world country. Can this actually happen?

Yes it happens in many countries. For example in UK someone mentioned they have Phenylketonuria and their NHS will not cover a medicine Kuvan that would improves their quality of life by allowing them to consume a reasonable amount of protein.

This is misleading at best. The NHS Comissioning Board has commissioned Sapropterin for use. However, due to its extraordinarily high costs and limited efficacy compared to maintaining a restricted diet, it is only prescribed in scenarios where there is an urgent clinical need for treatments like Sapropterin.

The NHS Commissioning Board's report on Tetrahydrobiopterin/Sapropterin/Kuvan is here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/e12-p-...

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

#218
post #138
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except these agencies have never had so much funding as they do now. Its hard to put a finger on exactly why they seem entirely incapable of fulfilling their central mission during this crisis. Why were the test kits botched? Why was testing so artificially limited? Why do the primers seem poorly designed? Why does the contact tracing seem to be so behind the ball? Etc. I think political finger pointing is easy and m…

Politico has a good piece[1], but with no real answers. But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the WHO test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays. This seems to give some kind of explanation of what wa…

The CDC just "had" to make their own test probably due to a combination of regulations and NIH syndrome (no pun intended). It wouldn't have been such an issue if they didn't fail so spectacularly at designing a test.

From what I gather, designing these things is not actually rocket science, more like grad-level work. The fact that local labs throughout the country were ready to go with their own self-made testing kits supports this.

The focus on containment by the White House IMO was totally appropriate. When you have zero local cases, that's what you focus on... in order to buy you time to prepare, shore up supplies and disaster plans, and distribute test kits. Containment (i.e. closing borders) is the political part of the process, so the Administration focused on that while the scientists are busy designing and distributing the test kits. In theory...

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

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could the CDC intentionally be avoiding increasing testing to avoid panic? If the numbers are to be believed, no matter what we'll see a sizable number of infected this year and risk losing many of the elderly. This is the only logical explanation at this point. Or you can replace "avoid panic" with "avoid bad press for Trump".

"A US government agency massively dropped the ball" should always be a possibility to consider. Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Both things are likely true here.

Also recall that incompetence in the CDC likely stems from politically-motivated firings and funding cuts in 2018.

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

#220
post #218
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politico has a good piece[1], but with no real answers. But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the WHO test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays. This seems to give some kind of explanation of what wa…

The CDC just "had" to make their own test probably due to a combination of regulations and NIH syndrome (no pun intended). It wouldn't have been such an issue if they didn't fail so spectacularly at designing a test. From what I gather, designing these things is not actually rocket science, more like grad-level work. The fact that local labs throughout the country were ready to go with their own self-made testing kit…

Containment is absolutely appropriate - and can and should be done within the country as well as border restrictions.

But it doesn't seem there has been much focus on that at all. Containment requires rapid large scale testing. The US doesn't seem at all prepared for that.

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