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A comment on Stanford Student Claims to Run Bootleg Covid-19 Testing Lab. Parent comment

Re:Stanford Student Claims to Run Bootleg Covid-19 Testing Lab by capableweb on Friday March 20, 2020 @07:07AM (#22636609)
There is another source (in German) claiming the same, HN comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22627958 and source here: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/info/16-Coronavirus-Update-Wi...

> Regarding your question about if we might accidentally test for flu or other, already existing corona virii:

> This was a topic of discussion in yesterday's talk [1] with Dr. Drosten, a virologist who played an important part in the development of the currently used PCR test. He said that there were extensive studies done with hundreds of samples from both flu patients and patients infected with other corona virii and none returned a positive result. The only other positive results were from corona virii that are special to certain animals (bats, some cows IIRC), but none of those are present in humans. So the accuracy of our current PCR test for SARS-CoV-2 seems to be extremely high.

Edit: realize now that it's the same person (Dr. Drosten) so same source, but different format (podcast vs transcript)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Stanford Student Claims to Run Bootleg Covid-19 Testing Lab by mkagenius on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @01:43PM (#22686794)
> And theoretically, the test would give a positive result on some bat corona viruses, but they do not affect humans.

What if I have flu and that corona virus which do not affect humans. People will think I have COVID.

Edit:

The test developed was done against 75 people with various other diseases as listed below to find out the false positive rate. With the 75 samples (having listed diseases), the false positive rate was 0.

  Clinical samples with known viruses Number of
samples tested in all three assays HCoV-HKU1 2 HCoV-OC43 5 HCoV-NL63 5 HCoV-229E 5 MERS-CoV 5 Influenza A (H1N1/09) 6 Influenza A (H3N2) 5 Influenza A(H5N1) 1 Influenza B 3 Rhinovirus/Enterovirus 3 Respiratory syncytial virus (A/B) 6 Parainfluenza 1 virus 3 Parainfluenza 2 virus 3 Parainfluenza 3 virus 3 Parainfluenza A or -B virus 5 Human metapneumovirus 3 Adenovirus 3 Human Bocavirus 3 Legionella spp. 3 Mycoplasma spp. 3

   Total clinical samples 75
I hope we didn't any other major common virus, and also is 75 a big enough number to say that the false positive rate is definitely 0?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Stanford Student Claims to Run Bootleg Covid-19 Testing Lab by acqq on Wednesday March 25, 2020 @06:26PM (#22689071)
> What if I have flu and that corona virus which do not affect humans.

By definition, you can't have the virus which doesn't affect humans. The virus that causes Covid-19 is called SARS-CoV-2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_acute_respiratory_syndr...

2 means it's only a second ever recognized such. The first caused the original SARS in 2002-2003.

[ Parent | on HN ]