It also doesn't solve many of the spontaneous human interactions that are hurt by this. A 13 min per person test that needs to be adminstered by somebody who knows what they are doing works fine in a factory. It probably is still too much friction for a restaurant, the subway, a stadium, kid's soccer practice, etc.
If you get tested by an authority - a doctor - then there is only so much discussion to be had. Whereas if you are asked to test yourself in the morning, who's going to be able to verify your claimed outcome?
Consider STD's and - in particular - HIV. Even with medical testing, the first basic lesson any teenager (should) get(s) is to use a condom if you don't know your partner.
Moreover, it's a good thing that many legal systems (a) only grant doctors the ability to issue sick leave and (b) protect the rights of those who are issued sick leave. Labor laws being byzantine as they are, allowing employers to test their workers at their own discretion poses a wide range of prickly legal issues.
The fact that South Korea or China (arguably) succeeded in curbing their epidemic happened because their public governance puts the collective above personal rights and people are totally fine with that because that's a deep part of the moral standard of their culture.
Current mass quarantine exercises are painful in the short term, but if you can keep them up for significant time, it might be possible to safeguard liberties and protections that aren't self-evident. You could curtail those exercises and favor self testing in order to open up the economy quicker, but doing that in a meaningful way requires that we all are prepared to compromise on some of those protections and rights, with all the unintended societal consequences that might bring.
I kind of disagree with that point. South Korea has succeeded in curbing the virus so far because, in large part, they are simply better prepared. To give a quick historical context, they suffered another (much smaller) coronavirus called MERS not too long ago (2015) and they ran into similar problems that many countries are now dealing with. So they spent the last 4-5 years improving their regulation (eg, quicker KFDA approval), logistics/supply chain (eg, testing kits development, distribution), and legal/public policy (eg, privacy and public disclosure) and preparing for the next virus outbreak.
So, for instance, we hear a lot about their high-tech, big-data driven tracking system (using personal GPS, credit cards data) to identify hotspots/potential contacts and isolate further infections -- that didn't exist 5 years ago during the MERS outbreak because it was thought to be intrusive and violated individual rights. The intrusive search and diagnosis strategy employed today was born out of necessity; normally not permissible under their moral or cultural code.
https://thebulletin.org/2020/03/south-korea-learned-its-succ...
As long as a large majority of people do the right thing, and report / self isolate if positive, a few people cheating here and there probably won't be enough to affect the course of the disease.
We need to remove incentives to cheat. I don't see much stigmatization of people with the disease in the USA, so that's not a worry. The biggest problem is economic, lost paychecks. We should probably require companies to allow sick leave for coronavirus, and have taxpayers pick up the tab for now.
The test device generates a QR code you can print or screenshot, and the inspector can scan that and it's either a device-signed message or a link to a repository which would say "this test was performed by machine 123456 at 2020-04-23 10:00:20, result negative"
If someone aims to defraud the system by having someone else take the test for them, or by forging the submission system, there's probably some fraud-related legal recourse.
Still not perfect, but this could be a workaround.
And yes, you would have to be re-tested regularly.
As the comment made by the other user here says, it will create more waves. Now, that the damage to the economy is greater than the cost of healthcare and lives of a pandemic, that's an opinion you're not backing with data.
Also, I might be biased because I have people in my circle who are at risk, but I think a real solution is more structured than this. Machines + mandatory gloves and masks would be certainly better.
To quote from Abbott's press release: "delivering positive results in as little as five minutes and negative results in 13 minutes."
I'm all for fast approvals and faster testing, but let's not make this sound like it's going to be the equivalent of popping into the McDonald's drive-thru for coffee. You can drive a truck through the loop hole of "as little as...."
I think this will help, but I am not sure that an Abbott press-release deserves the breathless praise that you're giving it.
Reagents for SARS-Cov-2 testing are in short supply. How is this better in that area compared to the new Danish test that doesn't use those reagents at all?
The end of the pandemic, even with this, is still going to be a lot more complicated. Zooming out a bit:
The third scenario is that the world plays a protracted game of whack-a-mole with the virus, stamping out outbreaks here and there until a vaccine can be produced. This is the best option, but also the longest and most complicated.
It depends, for a start, on making a vaccine. If this were a flu pandemic, that would be easier. The world is experienced at making flu vaccines and does so every year. But there are no existing vaccines for coronaviruses—until now, these viruses seemed to cause diseases that were mild or rare—so researchers must start from scratch. The first steps have been impressively quick. Last Monday, a possible vaccine created by Moderna and the National Institutes of Health went into early clinical testing. That marks a 63-day gap between scientists sequencing the virus’s genes for the first time and doctors injecting a vaccine candidate into a person’s arm. “It’s overwhelmingly the world record,” Fauci said.
But it’s also the fastest step among many subsequent slow ones.
From https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-will-.... That's the optimistic case per Ed Yong.
You acknowledge you're looking at an optimistic scenario. I hope everything breaks as smoothly as you imagine.
Looking at the record of the US Federal response thus far, if anything like this level of optimism was warranted, we almost assuredly wouldn't be in the mess we are at the moment.
The key facts are:
1. This is a test that directly detects SARS-Cov-2 virus. It can, if sensitive enough, tell you if you're infected even if you don't have any symptoms.
2. The detection time is very fast: 5 minutes for a positive result; 13 minutes for a negative.
3. The testing device is pretty compact. (Fits on a tabletop.)
If, in addition to the above, the following are also true:
4. The sensitivity of the test is high enough.
5. We can quickly scale manufacture of the testing platform and its reagents.
Then this development means the beginning of the end of the pandemic.* If all of the above are true, we can deploy fast testing to the entries/exits of factories, offices, etc. Folks who test positive get sent home to self-quarantine; folks who test negative can go back to work. Everyone gets ~13 minutes added to their daily commute, but they can work safely without spreading the virus.
The specificity of this test almost doesn't matter. Even if flu cases trigger a positive, those folks can still be sent to secondary testing or home quarantine. The government could pay them 100% of their salary for two weeks and it would still be a fantastic deal for the rest of us.
We can also ignore regulatory obstacles such as "this is only allowed in hospitals right now". The wider this testing regime is deployed, the higher a level of economic activity we can sustain while keeping R0 < 1. And given the scale of the stimulus efforts already underway, it's clear the government will do anything it can to revive the economy. Administrative barriers will be abolished as needed.
Obviously this scenario is conditional on all the above actually being true. But this is the most hopeful development I've heard of since mid-February.
* To be absolutely pedantic, it probably means more like a 95-98% mitigation of the pandemic within a few months.