Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

You do not need to trace. That is the point, you have rapid response tests everywhere. Once you test positive you go home and quarantine. However, you test kids coming into school every day, you test your employees everyday, you test restaurant guests each night. You literally protect people inside buildings by ensuring that no one who is infected and shedding virus can get in either. You open up large swaths of economic activity.

If my gym had a mandatory rapid test desk out front to where everyone walked up, left their phone number, took the test, went back to their car and was texted 15 minutes that they had a 5 minute window to enter the gym. I would go back to working out and re-starting my gym membership. In fact, I would kick in a monthly Covid-19 surcharge to help them cover the additional costs. Say $5-10 on my $25/month from every member would buy a lot of $1-5 antigen tests

 

Don't need to trace and quarantine but do become reliant on people to do what is right and isolate themselves if they test positive. If you isolate everyone that tests positive then you have effectively created a much better, targeted shutdown that would cut the spread

 

You do need to trace. Because after you test, you need to then find who was exposed and they need to quarantine until they pass a sufficient number of tests after exposure. Also, the antigen tests are not entirely reliable. Neither is the swab system, and I say system because after the Swab, the tests go to overworked labs. But a different system is worth a try as to what we are doing now. I certainly agree with a need for a better system.

 

And that's assuming you can even get people to take the test.

 

I hope UF is taking it a little more seriously

Photo of ‘questionable plexiglass barrier’ at Univ. of Georgia raises COVID-19 safety concerns | WFLA

 

Tracing is commendable, but at this point it's a waste of time and money. You're relying on people's memories of a 3-5 day period up to a week earlier, and then counting on variables of that.

hat I'm saying is based on the fact that I believe these guys who have been studying viruses their entire lives, and this one since it became an issue. And from them, two things about the virus are clear. The first is that it takes a lot of virus in a person's system to get to the point they can spread it to others. Several orders of magnitude more than the current test detects. The second is that it cultivates and grows fast but also reduces under a spreadable threshold quickly in most people. Someone is a spreader for a relatively short period of time -- three to five days. That's a much more workable timetable than 14 or 21 days. Just like you can be asymptomatic and spread, you can test positive with the current tests and not be infectious. You don't need to be quarantined unless you are in that short window of spreadability.

That's the point of the cheap, fast and disposable tests that aren't concerned with whether you have small amounts of the virus or remnants of the virus in you. We need tests that detect whether you have the tens of billions of viruses in you that make you a spreader. They don't need to go to labs -- they can be done in your house. And if you get a false negative one day, you won't get on the next and you'll still be at least two days ahead of waiting for the current testing system.

I know you've paid a lot of attention to this, and I respect it. But watch the video or listen to the podcast. These guys know what they are talking about. And we need smart people like you to spread the message on this. TWiV 640: Test often, fast turnaround, with Michael Mina | This Week in Virology.

 

Wow, that's actually disturbing.

 

In fairness to them the plexiglass is bolted at the base and it appears the tape is a visual so people don't bump into the sides. That said, Georgia Sucks

 

If they want to go to work or enter a public place they could be compelled to take the test

 

fascism!

 

Wait until we tell them about the chip we are going to require to be implanted to store the test results on

 

Friend of mine did a rapid saliva est.

Here is a link for those who don't want to listen for 1:46 hours. I am all for anything like this-- if it is reliable, replicated, and people will do it.


Failing the Coronavirus-Testing Test

What the country needs instead are rapid tests, widely deployed, so that infectious individuals can be readily self-identified and isolated, breaking the chain of transmission.



To do that, Mina says, everyone must be tested, every couple of days, with $1, paper-based, at-home tests that are as easy to distribute and use as a pregnancy test: wake up in the morning, add saliva or nasal mucous to a tube of chemicals, wait 15 minutes, then dip a paper strip in the tube, and read the results. Such tests are feasible—a tiny company called E25Bio, and another called Sherlock Biosciences (a start-up spun out of Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Broad Institute in 2019) can deliver such tests—but they have not made it to the marketplace because their sensitivity is being compared to that of PCR tests.

FOR PUBLIC-HEALTH PURPOSES, speed and frequency of testing are vastly more important than sensitivity: the best test would actually be less sensitive than a PCR test. As Mina explains, when a person first becomes infected, there will be an incubation period when no test will reveal the infection, because the viral loads are so low. About “three to five days later, the PCR test will turn positive, and once that happens the virus is reproducing exponentially in a very predictable fashion.” At that point, critically, “even if a rapid test is 1,000 times less sensitive than a PCR test,” Mina says, the virus is increasing so rapidly that the test “will probably turn positive within eight to 15 or 24 hours. So the real window of time that we’re discussing here—the difference in sensitivity that makes people uncomfortable”—is so small that public-health officers would be missing very few asymptomatic people taking the test in that narrow window of time. Given that the current testing frequency in most states, using highly sensitive but expensive and delayed PCR tests, is not even once a month, he points out—“Really, it’s never.”

So even though a saliva-based paper test wouldn’t register a positive result for as long as a half or even a full day after the PCR test, it would have great value in identifying pockets of infection that might otherwise be undetected altogether.

 

Really might want to make this part of the vaccines thread. Add my link if you think it is helpful.

 

Especially when PCR test is taking 3 - 7 days to get results. Makes no sense to not deploy these rapid test kits as fast as they can produce them unless you are making bank off of the PCR tests

 

Up to 2 weeks for PCR tests in some places.

 

45 kids under 15 have died of COVID. Out of 5 million cases so far.

319 kids died of swine flu in 2009-2010. Out of 60 million cases.

If swine flu was as deadly to kids as COVID, that number would have been closer to 540 kids died of swine flu.

And this is with schools closed. With swine flu we only closed schools with confirmed cases. And COVID already has a higher death rate for kids even with the schools being closed.

 

Which makes them worthless

 

The antigen tests 100% reliable for a certain level of infection. That level is still orders of magnitude below the point a human is infectious. They were reliable in almost 84% of the cases PCR tests were successful in....and those tests are entirely too sensitive at this point.

Further who cares about tracing if you have rapid tests everywhere? In a relatively short period of time you will catch almost everyone who is infectious and shedding by the prevalence of testing.

By the way, the FDA, and a team at Vanderbilt University and the University of Minnesota are conducting a 2500 family controlled experiment (some people are known to be infected, others known not to be as validated by other methods and some random) using the first potentially approved home test kit. Th

 

As Dr. Daniel Griffin, the Rockefeller Foundation, the guys on TWIV and others also point out, the Abbott ID Now, which was initially shelved, should be put back into use ASAP. Again, not as sensitive as PCR testing, but far more sensitive than the antigen tests and only takes about 30 minutes in the lab. In a follow up study, Abbott proved that the ID Now caught 100% of the patients who had viral loads high enough to be infectious and shedding. The technique uses only a single thermal cycle, where as PCRs require potentially numerous thermal cycles to amplify the genetic material to the level of detection.

We are literally killing ourselves because of this steadfast belief that we have to find every single person who might be carrying some low level amount of genetic material from the virus, despite not being sick or infectious.

This is why we are failing.

 

Tracking the Real Coronavirus Death Toll in the United States