I’m not sure why there’s an obsession with testing right now. If everyone is supposed to be isolating no matter what, what difference does it make if you have a covid test or not? If you have any symptoms at all, you should stay at home and isolate at least until you’re all better, whether or not you took a COVID test. From what I understand it’s the asymptomatic cases that are the problem, and they’re not getting tested anyway. It seems to only make sense once you’re in the hospital so the doctor knows what to treat, but a test that takes 10 days to come back is useless anyway, plus there’s probably other ways for doctors to tell whether you have covid, if you’re displaying severe symptoms.
Because western quarantine isn't true quarantine, and because what you really want to do is take every person who shows up with COVID-19 and then find out where they were for the last two weeks, and quarantine everyone they touched and do a proper quarantine on them.
But since that's not feasible, the alternative is to test as early as possible and hard-quarantine immediately -- by testing everyone constantly and everywhere, for which you really need sufficiently real-time results.
Right now, with soft-quarantine,the virus is still spreading, and the timer refreshing -- as soon as people are out and about again, rates will spike up again. Soft-quarantine is a delaying tactic (smoothening the curve), but not a solution.
But we also can't soft-quarantine for that long, because it's crushing the economy. If we keep doing it, there won't be much to go back to.
You need a test, and a fast one, or you don't have much
I’m not sure why there’s an obsession with testing right now.
Some people, grocery store workers and emergency workers are expected to be working. If you could test such workers as they show up at work, these work places would be much safer.
The "shelter in place" order is pretty as leaky as a sieve to be honest - people are still buying groceries at crowded stores because they don't have a choice. So yeah, if you could really confine everyone for three weeks, the problem would go away quicker but now, when that's not really what's happening, tests as a tool seem useful.
From what I understand it’s the asymptomatic cases that are the problem, and they’re not getting tested anyway.
When you have a ten minute test, why not test asymptomatic people?
Plus also, we need to be working hard now so we have testing, contract tracing and quarantine method available later, when they are need to "mop up" the remaining cases.
There are people who work in very essential roles (think power plants) who are already facing challenges with COVID right now. Ive heard a few stories about folks at plants where they've divided up teams in ways to prevent groups from mixing (to reduce the spread) and every time someones goes on or off shift fills out a sympton questionnaire and takes a temperature. This in addition to setting up to have people live on site. Having a ten minute test would help a ton in this area.
> If everyone is supposed to be isolating no matter what, what difference does it make if you have a covid test or not?
If we had widely available, quick, accurate testing then maybe we wouldn't need everyone to be isolating no matter what. Perhaps we still would need to for a few weeks, but not for months which would be a significant improvement.
Test are extremely important. Here in Spain, a PCR takes more or less 24h.
With fast testing you can control a pandemic BEFORE it gets out of control, like South Koread did. You control every single passenger an the border, at airports, so it does not spread to general population.
If there is someone who is not detected, when you do you control the people in their environment.
Making millions of people stay at home is a FAILURE of the system. You should control hundreds or thousands, not millions.
Robust testing is pretty likely to be an important component of whatever it is that comes after this initial wave. In a few weeks. So getting a 15 minute test like this one proved out and production scaled up is a big deal right now.
Some states need to lock down now because there are too many active cases. When the active cases get down and there are few new cases, we can end the lock down if we have cheap and abundant and quick tests, and have robust contact tracing. In addition, these measures can help us to bring down the new cases more quickly. Also, there are quite a few states where the active cases have not exploded yet. They can use these measures to avoid the fate of locking down.
If we can test and isolate, we can manage how the disease progresses through society, with a (very very slight, now) chance of stopping it. While not scientific, this is illustrative and well done that shows many aspects of disease spread:
> I’m not sure why there’s an obsession with testing right now. If everyone is supposed to be isolating no matter what, what difference does it make if you have a covid test or not?
I'll admit that this is a hard one to explain; I've gone through a bunch of drafts for this comment.
There is a 3-5 week (1-2 weeks incubation, 1-3 weeks to resolve the symptoms) lag between infection and conclusion of the disease. So all the statistical information available to the people responding to an outbreak is weeks out of date.
They (government bodies coordinating the response) don't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting ahead of an exponential process with a doubling time of ~4 days if they only have 3-5 week old information. They need sub-24 hour feedback on what is going on. Once that is in place, targeted & proactive methods can be deployed that are less crippling than turning off entire cities.
