we're in the middle of a pandemic. at some point you've got to accept that dystopia is here, and the dystopian things that are happening are realistic ways of dealing with the situtuation. you can't reject solutions because they sound dystopian unless you've got better, non-dystopian solutions. and everybody has to stay in their homes at all times and all non-essential services are shut down is not a less dystopian s…
Fair enough. But I hope that line of reasoning has limits. After all, it would be safer to send everyone by truck to a quarantine camp instead of back to their apartment where they might infect their neighbors in the lobby, wouldn’t it?
That's actually how China handled it. If you test positive, you don't go home - you go to a facility to be quarantined and treated if necessary.
Exactly. While this plan would certainly result in some disruption, it would be a lot less than the current status quo. And you can't really compare it to simply "opening back up" without a plan like this, because the simple fact is that even without government-enforced lockdowns, many (perhaps most) people won't return to a normal level of activity if they don't feel safe doing so.
> “...because the simple fact is that even without government-enforced lockdowns, many (perhaps most) people won't return to a normal level of activity if they don't feel safe doing so.“ you’re underestimating the pain that many americans are feeling after just a few weeks of (soft) lockdown. it’s not that people want to be unsafe, it’s that their livelihoods are in grave danger if the lockdowns last for months. many…
They're in a "startup incubator" for bio firms in South San Francisco.[1][2] The incubator is run by a unit of Johnson and Johnson. Multiple companies (51 are listed, but some may no longer be there) share 30,000 square feet of workspace there. "We welcome new resident companies with the infrastructure and tools they need to get up and running on day one. This capital efficient model takes time and investment out of the equation—eliminating the normal setup typically required of a startup."
I gathered the same thing. Basically the gist is, if we can develop a cheap, fast, and effective test for COVID-19 then we can test everywhere and re-open everything.
Hasn't that always been everyone's argument? That's the crux of Pueyo's "dance" [1], that as long as you've contained the initial outbreak, you can pretty much go back to normal if you track movement and have the capacity to test everyone who comes in contact with an infected person. [1]: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-learning-how-to-d...
That post, which was very popular, immediately came to my mind too.
It also feels like the logical next step to the very widespread testing found in countries like South Korea.
0) From a clinical perspective this is data we are generating on an on going basis. Analytically this is a largely a function of the characteristics of the affinity, specificity of the capture molecule used to capture the target (viral particle). As you point out EUA gives opportunities to launch sooner... But it's still critical to validate technogies both internally and externally probably to a greater extent than…
Thanks for your reply! Makes sense with regards to the specificity and sensitivity. Are those more scalable supply chains ones that expose you to risk with international suppliers? My understanding, at least from what we've been hearing from our governor's press conferences (so take it with a big political grain of salt obviously), is that while we have high throughput machines capable of large numbers of tests, the…
I think we're up against many of the same challenges everyone else (Roche, Abbott, et al.) is up against. At the end of the day if we could all wave a magic wand and fix supply chains we would. Technically, we (the collective diagnostics hive-mind) know how to detect viruses. We haven't yet figured out how to deploy these technologies on scales orders of magnitude above our baseline implementations.
An inadvertant Masterclass on how to convince a non-technical audience to invest in a tech startup.
- Take a huge and important problem
- Show the current challenges/lack of solutions
- Propose a 'radical' alternative
- Lend credence to the competency of the team
- 'How world can be saved'
- Imply the resultant victory
Gov Cuomo should call up Gov Pritzger. Illinois recognized the challenge of testing supplies and asked the state universities to solve the problem. They have. Illinois is reporting a lot more positive cases in the past week because they keep increasing the number of daily tests. I believe that today was well over 12000 tests in Illinois. Anyone who feels like getting tested is now allowed to get a test.
New York has done more tests and more tests per capita than any other state per latest numbers - the reason for more tests isn't just to test people who want it, it's to run large random tests, require tests before visiting nursing homes, get an accurate picture of the infection rate, etc. We're testing more per capita than most countries in the world and it's still not enough. We've tested approximately 4 times as m…
Sorry, I wasn't clear. Illinois has built out their own manufacturing supply chain and testing facilities. They are self-sufficient. If New York wants to scale up testing and has money to invest in doing so, they should look at how Illinois managed to make that happen.
Alright so lets unpack this argument, because (1) this is a pretty extreme oversimplification, and (2) the unstated suggestion you make is to quite literally let millions of people die world-wide who wouldn't have otherwise: > 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 m…
There's a bit of gish gallop and vitriol here. First, the .75% mortality rate is a one-time hit. It likely pulls some deaths forward, so the incremental death rate is maybe .5% in a single year. Again, this is terrible, and sad, but we should be mindful and accurate with numbers. Second, people make lots of choices that increase their mortality risk by .5%. For example, lots of people eat at McDonald's on a regular b…
Again, you realize debating the true value of the fatality rate is a bit silly when we already know healthcare systems will be overwhelmed (and have been overwhelmed already!!) if we hadn’t and don’t continue to manage this with severe measures? Do you agree with that statement? It doesn’t matter what the incremental mortality rate is. It doesn’t matter. We don’t know the true fatality rate, yes, but we do know it’s high enough that without severe restrictions on social life, healthcare systems will be overwhelmed, regardless of whether or not you think 1-2 million people dying from this vs 60,000 flu deaths is a big deal or not. Your argument was that our reaction is disproportionate, but it’s not disproportionate because if we don’t do this, healthcare resources will be overwhelmed and the economic damage could be severe in addition to the loss of life. Are you disagreeing with that?
The post refers to an alternative method of testing for COVID-19 based on surface plasmon resonance that would have significant advantages, but unfortunately it provides absolutely no real substantiation that the test exists or works. The link about surface plasmon resonance goes to a generic Wikipedia page, the link about saliva is a small scale study that was conducted on RT-PCR not surface plasmon resonance, and t…
According to my biochem-undergrad kid, surface plasmon resonance is a thing; it had come up in classes. "It's like doing an ELISA with no secondary antibody". Someone here will know what that means. I don't!
It's a very sensitive detection technique that uses some cool properties of light. We used it 20+ years ago in grad school (they were very expensive machines that were extremely hard to master; everything from calibration to routine operation was significantly more challenging than most devices I worked with) and I think it has quite a history before that. Never heard of it being used for rapid detection in a public environment; my experience is that things that work in a lab setting often don't externally unless somebody comes up with a good technology improvement (think vacuum tubes -> transistors -> small radios).
The arithmetic on that is ~1 million early deaths in the US. The screening in the article would cost billions of dollars. If it worked, we could then reuse the infrastructure to kill the flu. And then start on the colds.
> The arithmetic on that is ~1 million early deaths in the US. Sorry that's baseless histeria. We can easily think through how healthy people go back to normal (exponentially lower fatality rate than elderly/sick), while vulnerable take more precaution, how then getting to 60% of population gives us herd immunity which grinds R0 to a halt. Then a vaccine arrives in 18 months. Not to mention heat/humidity/summer is be…
I like how you're ignoring the organ damage in even younger survivors like it's rosacea or something.