Gates Foundation program will issue home testing kits for Covid 19 in Seattle

[joe_the_user]

Korea is doing drive-through testing with results available in three days. [1] That the US is still at the level of doing testing in a private and haphazard fashion is effectively criminal and seems likely to have a serious impact fairly soon. The US had a difficult time even testing all the workers at the nursing home in Washington where 11 people died.[2]

[1] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-south-korea-uses-driv...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/07/us/coronavirus-nursing-ho...

[partiallypro]

Everyone keeps pointing to the lack of availability of kits in the US without mentioning the reason. The reason is that the CDC created its own kits instead of using the WHO kits. Why did they do that? Because the WHO kits were inaccurate. Accurate diagnoses happened only ~60% of the time, basically a coin flip. In China the tests were becoming such a problem, now they basically just count anyone with symptoms. That's one of the reasons why numbers jumped drastically. Sometimes it takes up to 8 times to get a hit. Which when you think about it is completely ridiculous. That is with people with full blown symptoms.

The original CDC batch became tainted but were more accurate...unfortunately the CDC version was also giving false positives and didn't meet QC. To make matters worse CDC rules required very stringent guidelines for approval from third parties and states. Most of that has been lifted (I think this is what Trump was referring to when he said he was lifting something from the Obama admin, though I don't think it started with him. But who knows because Trump is often full of bluster.)

Here are a few articles about it.

https://www.livescience.com/coronavirus-testing-kits-flawed....

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51491763

https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus-covid-19-...

I wish people would stop pointing to South Korea and China as the paradigm of how this should be treated. It's entirely possible that the "drive thru" model with relatively inaccurate kits could make things worse. There isn't much point in producing millions of tests if they are no more accurate than a coin flip and can take up to 8 times to properly diagnose someone. Not to say the US hasn't bungled this and wasted some precious time.

The one thing, I'm pretty confused about at this point is how this has spread so quickly in Italy.

[wintorez]

I think this epidemic will expose a lot of weaknesses in public health sector globally. Hopefully, we will learn valuable lessons, but I wished we didn't have to learn them at the cost of losing numerous lives.

[djsumdog]

I think part of it may be intentional. No matter what, and the end, you will get accurate numbers for death, and there's not much that can be done for viral infections, other than cancelling large events and other means of transmission. Some can't be avoided though (elections are happening in the US).

Could the CDC intentionally be avoiding increasing testing to avoid panic? If the numbers are to be believed, no matter what we'll see a sizable number of infected this year and risk losing many of the elderly.

[excerionsforte]

Low cost home testing kits can go beyond SARS-COV2 and track other diseases all from the safety of your home. Why go to the hospital where you could possibly be infected by other people with infectious diseases or infect the people around you.

Personally, if it is low cost enough that I don't need to use health insurance then I am all for it. Health insurance is good enough until surprise they don't want to cover you or you get surprise bills in the mail from the hospital.

Gates Foundation is absolutely forward thinking. I like it a lot.

[aplummer]

> Health insurance is good enough until surprise they don't want to cover you or you get surprise bills in the mail from the hospital.

Constantly amazed this can be a thing in a first world country. Can this actually happen?

[Gatsky]

This is really important, especially in countries where flu season is coming.

At the same time, I’ve been reading papers in top journals about various clever technologies to do rapid (ie <60 minutes) detection of pathogens for years. The latest was using crispr [1]. None of them seem to have left the lab, PCR is still it.

Final point, nanopore sequencers are ideal for rapid home testing, and you get the actual sequence. They are a bit too expensive unfortunately.

https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00601-3

[john_minsk]

How expensive are they? I don't see the price behind your link

[koenigdavidmj]

We need some states to just start defying the CDC and doing whatever testing they deem necessary. With media backlash and sympathetic juries, no court case will actually succeed if the feds try to charge them with anything, and this is a life-or-death matter. Italy is a first world nation doing testing, and even they are swamped—what will we be in a week?

[abductee_hg]

is anybody surprised?

availability seems not the be the problem, you can order them since 3 weeks ago from alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?fsb=y&IndexArea=product...

or, if you prefer from italy: https://www.screenitalia.it/test-coronavirus-covid-19/

the problem here seems to be of an organisational nature...

[peter303]

Numerous articles about $4000 fees if test done at ER.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/03/02/why-are-we-bein...

The new fed law and my state make the test itself free, but dont address the high service charge at some medical centers. Sick people might be reluctant to test as early as they should.

[appleflaxen]

the irony is that if these are not already FDA-approved devices, then selling them (and even giving them, I think) to consumers will be illegal.

it seems clear that the regulations would be harming the public interest and should not be enforced, but you could imagine a scenario where there was a politician with a political grudge against a liberal city like Seattle.

[SubiculumCode]

I am scheduled to give a talk at large science conference in Seattle this May. I have a feeling its going to get canceled though. :/

[DangerousPie]

I would be pretty surprised if this was going ahead at this point.

[mgleason_3]

Seattle's lucky to have a benefactor, though it may highlight yet again the stark differences between the have's (in this case a rich tech companies) and have not's - everyone else.

[animalnewbie]

I don't expect much from trump but I'm mad at Newsom at this point. Why can't he do something about Cali?

[claudeganon]

From what I’ve seen, a lot of the false negatives with these tests comes from the fact they require two swabs (nose and throat) that must be performed thoroughly/correctly in order to get a viable sample. I wonder how home testing will impact efficacy.

[ckdarby]

Source please, couldn't find this information anywhere saying this.

[magma17]

are they iot devices that send a positive to authorities and get you in quarantine?

[fancyfredbot]

This is very admirable of Bill, but it seems odd that the world's biggest economy is reliant on hand-outs to keep its citizens healthy.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Starve the beast is working as intended. Mission accomplished.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22521338.

[sitkack]

What the parent is referencing is the Republican strategy to defund government services, and then point to how ineffective they are, thus providing justification for privatization.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/02/amid-coronavirus-out...

[bshoemaker]

Our government is led by idiots, this is the result

[fortran77]

Bill Gates is a great man.