Pooling is good:
If we look at this from the view of whole-population biosurveillance after the outbreak period is over and we have a 0.1% base infection rate, pools of 32 samples have an expected number of tests per person at 0.0628 or a 15.9x multiple on throughput/cost reduction.
Not even people dying left and right causes organizations to abandon the rules. Third world processes: Because of privacy concerns, the company’s call center does not leave voice messages. Its operators call back only 2x before moving to the next patient.
There’s also a lot of wishful thinking about serology tests:
There is no “serology test” – there are millions of possible serology tests, which need to be carefully compared and characterized to select ones that do more than just show you if some antibody against the virus is present. Reliable titres are going to be essential in the next phase of understanding this new viral infection – identifying who has protective immunity.
FDA delenda est
An innovative testing program in the Seattle area — promoted by the billionaire Bill Gates and local public health officials as a way of conducting wider surveillance on the invisible spread of the virus — has been ordered by the federal government to stop its work pending additional reviews.
Frequent, fast, and cheap is better than sensitive:
when you compare testing regimes it’s hard to come up with a scenario in which infrequent, slow, and expensive but very sensitive is better than frequent, fast, and cheap but less sensitive
Bill Gates is not impressed:
The majority of all US tests are completely garbage, wasted. If you don’t care how late the date is and you reimburse at the same level, of course they’re going to take every customer. Because they are making ridiculous money, and it’s mostly rich people that are getting access to that. You have to have the reimbursement system pay a little bit extra for 24 hours, pay the normal fee for 48 hours, and pay nothing And they will fix it overnight.