“Ubiquitous daily screening” has this William Gibsonesque edge to it.
Add the idea that anyone who has already had it gets a pass and it sounds worse.
A Third Solution
381–390 of 535 posts
Re: A Third Solution
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
A solution that works outside of the vicinity of New York, would still allow at least 47 other states to open up. As for checking who has a test, simply give colored stickers. If someone wants to “beat” the system, so be it. Social disapproval and common sense will keep most people honest.
New York City isn't the only place in which car ownership is low. What about Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, DC, etc? If your plan for reopening the nation doesn't include reopening our cities, it isn't a real plan for reopening the nation. You need a plan for people who want to beat the system because they present a huge danger. The whole idea behind this system is to allow the people insi…
that also doesn't mean that if you come up with a plan that only partially works you stop working on it. Perfect is the enemy of good.
Could you protect a food processing plant with this method? Yes. Does it cover testing in LA? No. Does LA need food and other shipments? Yeah they do.
Re: A Third Solution
#383This person has a lot of fear in them. Sad. This person's third solution is a horrible authoritarian nightmare. Someone get him some help.
Worst part is he think this is perfectly sane.
"What we need is a leper colony for all the lepers so that I don't get sick. It sounds so scary to me!"
Re: A Third Solution
#384Quotes from the article: “It’s easy to fall into dystopian visions of the future — a world shut down by one virus after another” “It doesn’t have to be that way. ..... Ubiquitous screening is the key.” The approach is interesting and the possibility of eliminating large scale spread of covid, flu and others is attractive. However the idea of requiring a saliva swab from every visitor to an office or event has the pot…
An easy fix would be to require that all saliva samples are disposed of into the same container, mixing all samples of all tested persons.
Re: A Third Solution
#385See a therapist.
Re: A Third Solution
#386Quotes from the article: “It’s easy to fall into dystopian visions of the future — a world shut down by one virus after another” “It doesn’t have to be that way. ..... Ubiquitous screening is the key.” The approach is interesting and the possibility of eliminating large scale spread of covid, flu and others is attractive. However the idea of requiring a saliva swab from every visitor to an office or event has the pot…
An easy fix would be to require that all saliva samples are disposed of into the same container, mixing all samples of all tested persons.
Perhaps, but if you think about how systems like this work today, for example scanning ID at the entrance to a nightclub or bar.
One way something like this is likely to be implemented is by validating a ticket or access card/token with a saliva swab. This is just too easy and attractive an opportunity for data collection to be passed up by some operators with business models that monetise the data as a revenue source.
Re: A Third Solution
#387The 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…
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.
Is this what you're looking for? Scientists at NTNU St. Olav's Hospital has made a test that can check 150,000 patients per week for Corona infection [1]. (Yes, it's the same uni that used the USA as an example in warning students abroad against poorly developed health systems lol.) Already testing is a lot more frequent in Norway because of it, and they're cautiously re-opening some businesses and services, the first of which are kindergartens and hair dressers.
The Norwegian health authorities also published an app that can be voluntarily downloaded, that tracks and warns about infected, while also collecting research data for future use. [2] The app has garnered some criticism for leaking user data, and for discharging the battery too quickly. The retort is that it's of course voluntary and anonymous, and that it's actually tracking less data than Facebook or Google.
[1]: https://norwegianscitechnews.com/2020/04/from-thousands-of-t...
[2]: Norwegian language source: https://www.fhi.no/nyheter/2020/ny-app-fra-folkehelseinstitu...
Re: A Third Solution
#388The 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…
Hi, Walker here, one of the PreDxion Bio co-founders. Heres a some more information on the technology underlying the test we are developing: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25790830/ . Unfortunately, up until about a month ago us like many folks, were blissfully minding our business developing a rapid point of care cytokine detection platform for use in monitoring patients experiencing certain immune responses follow…
Thanks for engaging with the HN community. I'm a bit disappointed that the original article doesn't say if the author is associated with your company. At one point he says "We", but it's never clear. Did I miss something? Your comment doesn't address this issue at all. Investor? Employee?
Ethics are an important thing.
Re: A Third Solution
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seemed in-kind with the “dystopia is here” rhetoric, but I understand answering in the same vein doesn’t make things better. If I could still edit the comment, I would replace the first “you” with “we”, as none of the comment is meant to be directed personally at OP. The dystopia we have is purely one of our own creation. One which TFA seems to not only welcome with open arms, but seeks to capitalize upon. It’s re…
There are two things that don't make sense to me about your original post. One is that cash is not a resource. It's even less of a resource when it's not only not metal, but mostly not paper either. The other is that the flu comparison doesn't make sense to me on multiple levels. Given deaths from COVID at the moment are nearly ten times flu on an annualized basis, given the partial shutdown, obviously they would be…
Thanks for the feedback!
I’m not quite sure what to say to “cash is not a resource”. Even if just a proxy for attention cash is obviously a resource. But really, cash in itself is a resource. $10 trillion dollars can do a lot of things if spent wisely. $10 trillion dollars can also be destroyed for practically no benefit at all.
I agree it’s not strictly $1 spent on A means $1 less to spend on B. But it’s at least true to some extent, and again, as a proxy for attention and willingness to enact change, it’s a valid measure.
So the flu comparison is because they are both respiratory illnesses which kill a lot of people. In the 2017-2018 season the flu killed 61,000 in the US. Hospitals in NYC were stretched very thin. Nobody really noticed. It wasn’t even declared a pandemic.
Obviously it’s impossible to say with certainty if we have seen 1/4th, 1/3rd, or 1/2 of the total deaths that we are going to see from this SARS-CoV-2. But I think nobody is currently out there claiming that we’ve only seen 1/10th of the total deaths from SARS-CoV-2 that we’ll get by the time it’s over. (SARS-CoV-3 is another story?)
“Ten times flu on an annualized basis...” So 50k times 4 is 200k. That’s not nearly 600k. Just trying to follow your math. If we’re halfway through now (IHME thinks we’re about 3/4 through) then we‘ll have seen in COVID the equivalent of two bad years of flu.
Orders of magnitude generally provide rough measures of classification and are a nice rule of thumb for telling if one thing is “radically different” than another thing. So, flu kills up to 650k globally per year. Maybe COVID will do roughly the same, maybe 2-3x, but I think at least we’ve long past the days of claims that COVID will kill 5 million worldwide are being tossed around. And it’s not because no one’s caught it and we just need to keep hunkered down. It’s because a massive number of people caught it and overall its just not that deadly.
If governments around the world had done their jobs and shared data and been truly prepared and with a little luck and a lot of hard work this whole thing perhaps could have been avoided by early and arduous contact tracing. That day is long behind us.
I worry that by now so much energy and ink has been spilled getting the country into lockdown, and people are so politically invested in it, and all the social pressure campaigns have ramped up to max,... that now as data finally emerges which demonstrate it was all a gross overreaction, we will be too slow to correct.
In the meantime 10s of millions have lost their jobs, perhaps millions have lost their businesses. A $1T deficit seems like a quaint memory (sorry grandkids!).
And it was all for, what, exactly? When herd immunity is the endpoint and the IHME hospitalization predictions were wrong by 10x... overbending the curve only causes suffering and does not save lives. Bending the curve too far into next winter could actually cost lives, which the CDC acknowledged earlier this week in a very roundabout way. And bending the curve at all only helps if additional medical treatment availability would have actually saved more lives, something which I have not seen a strong case for.
Re: A Third Solution
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a thing, but doing a saliva test with limited sample prep (which you need to be beat PCR, otherwise you might as well just make more known to work qPCR machines) is not something anyone has accomplished with it for any virus. It’s a promising technology; but not for having a widely deployable test before we have boring old ELISA antigen tests. Which we have developed for plenty of viruses, and which some individ…
Test complexity (sample prep, test workflow) is a real challenge to achieving testing scales at orders of magnitude above what is presently available. We should hopefully have boring old ELISA antigen tests shortly, thanks to Abbott and many of the other folks we've all heard from. The real challenge is scaling testing beyond what can be reasonably implemented from central lab facilities.
> The real challenge is scaling testing beyond what can be reasonably implemented from central lab facilities
The SPR machines I’m familiar with are not inexpensive. Are there machines appropriate for these tests that are less expensive such that it could be rolled out widely? Sample cost is low, but a warehouse shift change of several thousand people isn’t going to need only one machine for screening as the load on the machines will be very bursty.