231–240 of 247 posts
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The other bottleneck in WA is that the state's multimillion dollar, IBM-contracted data collection program can't keep up ingesting a few thousand records a day.
That's just for public data reporting, so doesn't stop people from actually doing tests.
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That's where I've been getting data. We have a long way to go. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y9_ZrMBhhVLg2xQHtBCc...
Why do you state that our testing capacity has been maxed out? My understanding is that factors like the availability of swabs and the availability of medical personnel to administer tests are a bigger bottleneck than qPCR machines.
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In SA right now I believe everything is closed to a much greater extent than most other places. For example, restaurants are not allowed to even deliver food. Only ingredients for preparing meals at home can be delivered by grocery stores. No alcohol or tobacco. Aggressive policing of the rules.
> Only ingredients for preparing meals at home can be delivered by grocery stores. So they're also closed to in-person shopping?
I think the comment was meant that if you are in the food business, the only option is to deliver ingredients. Some businesses that used to deliver vegetables to restaurants now deliver to houses instead.
But in-person shopping for food is allowed. I don't know what they will do in the medium term, because other services will have to start operating again.
I'm the co-founder and CTO at BillionToOne. I'm happy to answer any questions here. I've also posted a slightly more technical explanation of how the test works and why it can scale here: https://twitter.com/dtsao/status/1247642005510873088?s=21 Edit: Since our site seems to be overwhelmed at the moment, here's a recap: We’ve been working hard at BillionToOne on a new COVID-19 test that scales testing to everyone in…
There still needs to be tests taken from individuals and conveyed to the labs? many of these tests will be repeats from individuals who might have taken it earlier? etc
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Hey, lowly Bio undergrad here, but how are you able to skip the RNA extraction step? I read the paper and you use the viral transport medium, but wouldn't you have to also purify RNA from that (or is it just much easier to extract RNA from that medium)? I also dived into the paper behind the "skip the RNA extraction step" methodology and it basically seems to swap out one RNA extraction kit for another (Qiagen RNeasy…
Thanks for the question! The goal of skipping RNA extraction is to decrease the amount of labor necessary for processing samples and also to eliminate a dependency on RNA extraction reagents that have recently become difficult to find. The FDA is very strict about the specific brand and model of kit you use, so showing that you can swap out one RNA kit for another is actually very useful because you will have allevia…
I'm the co-founder and CTO at BillionToOne. I'm happy to answer any questions here. I've also posted a slightly more technical explanation of how the test works and why it can scale here: https://twitter.com/dtsao/status/1247642005510873088?s=21 Edit: Since our site seems to be overwhelmed at the moment, here's a recap: We’ve been working hard at BillionToOne on a new COVID-19 test that scales testing to everyone in…