61–70 of 535 posts
Frankly, I don’t understand how this test is supposed to work, and I’ve used a Biacore! It might be helpful to have a technical explanation available, for domain experts to evaluate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a terrible analysis, for reasons well-covered all over HN and elsewhere. This is a whole different thing from 'another flu'. We have to address it head-on. Throwing people (a million people?) under the bus is not going to fly, not politically and not morally.
Every year around 3 or 4 million people die in America from a variety of causes. This is sad, but at some point, everyone has to die. Data is showing that the infection fatality rate is around 0.5%-1%, and is concentrated in older people. [1] is one study, but there are many others. Given this data, it's clear that our current response is out of proportion with reality. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g…
> Data is showing that the infection fatality rate is around 0.5%-1%, and is concentrated in older people.
right, "old" (65+?) people are going to die anyway, lets just let them die sooner. How much sooner? Years? Decades? Does this really sound like a cogent counterargument to not letting people die?
Let's ignore the morality aspect of this, which I don't think is in your favor, to put it mildly. I don't really like people suggesting that millions of people should die because "this is sad, but at some point, everyone has to die." Yikes.
But lets pretend we live in a very nauseating reality where older people don't really matter very much. You should still want society shut down to prevent this spreading out of hand because this will easily and thoroughly overwhelm all of our healthcare resources, which will mean hundreds of thousands of people you actually do care about (i.e. non-older people) will also die from lack of medical care either from COVID, pre-existing medical conditions, new medical conditions, etc.
This isn't a unique idea. This is the mainstream view. Everyone knows we need more testing and that testing is the only way to effectively ease distancing rules. That was a pretty extensive writeup to say what we've been hearing from all rational information outlets for a month.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why I think testing at the door is the more straightforward way to start. We can reopen factories, office buildings, even shopping malls, but no one gets in without passing the screen.
But that just moves the compliance and logistics problem back one step. Who's doing this massive amount of testing? If it's the government, you'd need armies of workers spread out everywhere. If it's the owners of these buildings, who checks to ensure compliance? Imagine trying to enforce this on every non-residential building in, say, NYC. It would be practically impossible.
Who checks to make sure every restaurant follows the standards of cleanliness? They have inspectors who (theoretically) show up randomly, so it ensures most places comply voluntarily, because the cost of getting caught is very high.
A combination of random inspections and steep fines would solve the compliance problem.
Edit: I just had another idea. Offer cash rewards to people who can prove they they weren't tested when entering a public place (which the business pays for via fines). You'd have people running around trying to find missed testing for the cash reward.
Does this approach bypass the reagent shortages ?
What are the specificity / sensitivity metrics ?
> First of all, it’s not “just the flu”. It is something much more dangerous. Catching this virus is a bit like playing a round of Russian roulette. You’ll probably be fine, but you could end up dead I think this is mischaracterizing it. People have to die eventually. One year of existence has a mortality rate of 1%. For a 75-84 year old individual it is nearly 5%. Above 85 it's 14%. [1] The coronavirus infection fat…
The things that generally kill Americans (heart disease, cancer, car crashes, diabetes, etc) aren’t contagious, so this is a bad analogy.
If getting it confers lifelong immunity (a question that does not yet have a definite answer), that means getting it means you compressed the overall risks of two years into one[0], or reduced your life expectancy by one year.
Now, one year is a lot. But the difference in life expectancy between the US (78) and Japan (84) is already six times as much, so the lockdown in that context is about 6 times more expensive (per day, per person) than moving to Japan[1] would have been before COVID19, and no one would have preached the latter.
Here's a conundrum: you can (a) lock yourself at home for 6 months, likely losing your job, potentially keeping in touch through the internet; then come back to "normal" life. (b) give up 6 months of your life expectancy, but go back to your normal life tomorrow. That is, w.r.t life expectancy, you can pause for 6 months and keep those 6 months; or fast forward those 6 months (and thus lose them). Almost everyone I know would pick (b) if there aren't any exception circumstances such as terminal disease. But the western world at large chose (a).
[0] That's not exactly true - depending on some other model parameters; reduction of life expectancy by 6-9 months is more accurate.
[1] It's not guaranteed that moving to Japan would grant you Japanese life expectancy. It is also not guaranteed that the lockdown as practiced really buys you more than a year either.
One way to achieve ubiquitous screening is for people to perform regular VO2max tests (loosely speaking; you can do submaximal exercises for this). You quickly figure out if you have a stress on your immune system (by watching various metrics), and there are sports-science papers showing this (because they use it to avoid overtraining, which also appears as a stress on the immune system). This is of course not easy t…
Doesn't a VO2max test take 20 minutes, plus a shower afterwards? That sounds significantly more expensive than collecting vials of saliva. Also, you'd definitely need to do those VO2max tests in separate, sealed rooms because infected people would be huffing out maximum virus.
I'll give my Garmin 645 credit for consistency day to day, though I have no idea how close it is to giving the correct value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a terrible analysis, for reasons well-covered all over HN and elsewhere. This is a whole different thing from 'another flu'. We have to address it head-on. Throwing people (a million people?) under the bus is not going to fly, not politically and not morally.
Every year around 3 or 4 million people die in America from a variety of causes. This is sad, but at some point, everyone has to die. Data is showing that the infection fatality rate is around 0.5%-1%, and is concentrated in older people. [1] is one study, but there are many others. Given this data, it's clear that our current response is out of proportion with reality. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/g…
Of course, as others point out, there's also the enormous strain on the hospital system. Which, I am very curious: are you not aware of what has been going on with the NYC hospitals? Or parts of Italy?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Compliance is tough. And my main concern would be false positives- if we are screening more people more frequently, we would have a lower expected percent of true positives, and even a small false positive rate could lead to significant overdiagnosis and disruption. The more often the test the more stringent that requirement. I dont know much about the testing method described in the article, but I wonder if it has u…
A reasonable policy is to go home when the machine at the door to your office gives a positive result. Then get a more specific PCR test, and maybe come back to work. So the cost of a false positive can be one lost day. The false positive rate of lockdowns is 100%.