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We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day

billiontoone.com

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Re: We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day

#91

Post by buzzkillington »

mike_d wrote: post #88
buzzkillington wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it incredible that no one has done these studies before issuing the lock down orders. Without knowing what the proportion of people who have been exposed but aren't sick any response is the wrong response. If it turns out that it's already spread to most everybody lock downs are just a way to create more homelessness. If it turns out that the only people with the antibodies are the ones in the hospitals we nee…

These studies were done well in advance. Every bit of research we have about the 1918 Influenza points to social isolation being the only effective way to combat a pandemic.

Please provide the doi for the articles which tell us the prevalence of covid-19 in the general population.

Re: We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day

#93

Post by empath75 »

billiontoone wrote: post #76
12xo wrote: post #32

This is awesome. Thank you for all your work. One million a day seems like a lot until you realize it would take about a year to test everyone in the US... How can we increase this to 10m per day? Is that possible?

I think we can scale it to significantly more than 1M a day, but it would require the relaxation of certain regulations that currently prevent collaboration between clinical laboratories and other institutions that have Sanger instruments. FDA and CMS require that clinical laboratories process the sample end-to-end, so it prevents a distributed model of initial processing in the clinical laboratory followed up with s…

Could you get some of those Sanger machines loaned to you temporarily?

Re: We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day

#94

Post by s_y_n_t_a_x »

cheriot wrote: post #37

This would be HUGE. Not only has the testing capacity in America been maxed out, but the % of positive results has been more than 20% and trending upward. In order to quarantine effectively (read: end the shut down) we need to test the family, coworkers, and contacts of every positive result.

Testing has been ramping up https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily

Re: We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day

#95

Post by mattmanser »

dvdt wrote: post #71
abhisuri97 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the UK they're saying there's a shortage of swabs and pipettes even, do you not need these too?

Also, in the UK our independent and uni labs have been saying for almost a week they could extract the RNA differently but the NHS have a fixed approved way that they won't change.

- Are the chemicals you're using more common or would there just be a new shortage of different chemicals?

- Is there a risk you'd be creating a test that didn't work very well, and the US would end up with a bunch of useless tests (e.g. Italy had to abandon a bunch of Chinese sourced tests, UK's anti-body tests are ineffective)?

Re: We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day

#96

Post by amirhirsch »

dvdt wrote: post #71
abhisuri97 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The spike-in DNA injection is clever. How did you develop that technology? It seems like the kind of thing that just hits you one day.

Re: We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day

#98

Post by JamisonM »

yters wrote: post #82
buzzkillington wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it incredible that no one has done these studies before issuing the lock down orders. Without knowing what the proportion of people who have been exposed but aren't sick any response is the wrong response. If it turns out that it's already spread to most everybody lock downs are just a way to create more homelessness. If it turns out that the only people with the antibodies are the ones in the hospitals we nee…

Yes, if you google "coronavirus iceland" you'll see they've tested almost their entire population. They found 1586 confirmed cases, of whom only 6 died, which gives a fatality rate of 0.4%. Turning this around, if we multiply confirmed deaths by 264, that gives us an estimate of how many cases there are. So, for example, with UK's death count of 6159 this means about 2.4% of the population is infected. Furthermore, o…

Iceland has only tested 28,992 of its residents as April 6th, so that throws the rest of this conjecture out the window. (Although regardless the conjecture was probably not a great idea.)

https://covid.is/data

Re: We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day

#99

Post by snorrah »

Your site states you use a “proprietary machine learning algorithm”. As someone who has seen a gamut of companies use the machine learning phrase to justify almost any conceivable product, could you share any non-confidential information about what you achieve using ML?

Re: We’re working on 1M Covid-19 testing capacity per day

#100

Post by mrkurt »

freepor wrote: post #66
dang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do that occasionally when coaching YC startups with their HN launches ( https://news.ycombinator.com/launches ), which this is a variant of.

So, you have explicit permission to do this ahead of time, from the user?

dang has built up a ton of trust from yc founders, and hopefully from HN commenters. We love when he improves our HN posts.
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