05-11-2020, 10:59 AM
A number of articles suggest some good news about testing:
1) We are up to 250,000 tests a day: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/pu...-still-lag on average for the first week in May. Based on what I've seen, we need between 2 and 10 times as many tests (my instinct is that something around 1 million tests daily, if strategically deployed, would be effective).
2) The FDA approved an in-home saliva test, which will simplify one of the big challenges about testing (deploying adequately protected workers who can obtain the nasopharyngeal swabs). We will see how well the test performs, but if they perform well enough and can scale up, this would be a good way to do community surveillance (give people a tube, have them spit into it, and use the results to estimate prevalence in the community and quickly identify an outbreak).
3) The FDA also approved an antigen test: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus...tigen-test, which is a bit like the "rapid" flu test. This will be really helpful for scenarios where you need results quickly (like healthcare providers treating patients or even workers more generally).
On the negative side, the Economist made a good point about testing. With the president continually saying "everyone who wants a test can get one", companies have been slow to ramp up production, because everyone is assuming the someone else has already ramped up production.
BC
1) We are up to 250,000 tests a day: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/pu...-still-lag on average for the first week in May. Based on what I've seen, we need between 2 and 10 times as many tests (my instinct is that something around 1 million tests daily, if strategically deployed, would be effective).
2) The FDA approved an in-home saliva test, which will simplify one of the big challenges about testing (deploying adequately protected workers who can obtain the nasopharyngeal swabs). We will see how well the test performs, but if they perform well enough and can scale up, this would be a good way to do community surveillance (give people a tube, have them spit into it, and use the results to estimate prevalence in the community and quickly identify an outbreak).
3) The FDA also approved an antigen test: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus...tigen-test, which is a bit like the "rapid" flu test. This will be really helpful for scenarios where you need results quickly (like healthcare providers treating patients or even workers more generally).
On the negative side, the Economist made a good point about testing. With the president continually saying "everyone who wants a test can get one", companies have been slow to ramp up production, because everyone is assuming the someone else has already ramped up production.
BC