Tests are going to continue to lag for quite awhile. They are simply very difficult, in their current form, to scale up to where we need them. This is true nearly the world over, until we develop some sort of simpler test for antibodies (so a few drops of blood could tell you quickly if someone had been strongly exposed to the virus). That's in the works, as I understand it. I keep asking my biologist buddies "How TF did South Korea get such massive testing?" And they basically say two things: (1) they were ready for this after SARS, much moreso than most places, and (2) they ordered basically all hands on deck, mandatory all biological and medical scientists working on testing 24/7. (It's kinda laborious, from what I understand, which is just one reason it doesn't scale up very well.)
Ah - thank you. Damn, that's what I get for believing the administration. Seriously thought testing capabilities would be way better by now.
I think they're getting better, but not at the exponential rate the virus is spreading in America. It's like you can double or triple testing capacity with a lot of work but not get 50x or 100x very easily. (This is all based on what my biologist wife and her buddies say; her lab has donated the sort of equipment that San Francisco can use to run tests.)
It's interesting. I might honor that worry except that something SK did really worked! Our tests in the US have a non-small rate of false positives and false negatives anyway. Le sigh.
Yeah..they say that only the PCR tests are worth to use and the SK ones apparently have lower reliability and sensitivity. They are false negatives for the first days of incubation and false positive even if someone is recovered and is immune. But the PCR tests are more expensive and take 1-2 hours.
Weren't they suppose to stop tolls once the tollway paid for itself? I guess you need maintenance money but god beltway 8 must be a cash cow of epic proportions.
Did it? If the story about South Korea quickly bending down the curve is based on data from faulty tests, do we even know what's true? Maybe they have a bigger problem now than we know about? Or maybe they started with a smaller problem than we thought! Or, maybe they just used false positives to quarantine so many people that they managed to quash the outbreak without ever knowing who has what. Just musing. I'm frustrated that the US doesn't have more tests, but I appreciate our desire to have accurate tests.
My Brother in Law is recovering from it, and my buddies wife is in the middle of it. Neither traveled anywhere interesting and both don't know where they got it. This virus is EVERYWHERE - be safe. DD
Well, I think they have a relatively free press and reports would already be out of dead bodies. Their tests seem to have been good enough.
I think South Korea has a couple things going for it: 1. Many Asian countries are much more compliant to their governments. Look at Japan not being hit super hard either. They said to social distance and their people didn't run out to Spring Break. 2. They shut down a lot of travel early. 3. They tested a lot. The CDC and FDA are "gold standard" medical agencies for approvals. Basically the most stringent in the world, and the accuracy rate of the WHO test and the tests used by S. Korea were not good enough for approval, so we developed our own. 4. It goes back to energy vs perfection. In crisis, energy is better than perfection. Even though their tests were pretty inaccurate, they were accurate ENOUGH to do the job. The CDC and FDA were still in "perfection" mode. Some would say they still are with some of the possible treatments. They have lessons learned however, that you don't want the cure to be worse than the disease. 5. We also got delayed by about a week to 10 day because our first tests delivered were faulty. 6. We didn't take a lesson learned from China: there were early studies that radiolgical readings on chest scans were incredibly accurate in diagnosing COVID-19. 97% accurate. Even without tests, we could have been using radiological chest scans for those in the hospitals to diagnose earlier. 7. Underplayed for S. Korea...they have a very intrusive CCTV program in their society. They were able to leverage their citizen surveillance programs to track down a ton of case exposure along with facial recognition and big data. A lot of the USA doesn't have near the surveillance that S. Korea has.
I wish them well! We're still waiting on my son's results. Off of work until they come back. There's only 5 cases in my county, so I doubt we have it.
