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Comment by whateveracct | Hacker News Reader

Surely still important progress & a big deal though, right?

This will make it easier to tell if a symptomatic person has COVID or something else. But it won't help with early detection, which is what is most urgently needed.

We needed early detection weeks ago. That ship has sailed. At this point a test like this is probably more urgent. The lead time on getting tests for patients showing up to the hospital (i.e. they have symptoms) will make a massive difference in how much PPE the hospital goes through.

Early detection is utterly irrelevant at this point it’s endemic at most places now.

Exhaustive testing and selective isolation would be better than lockdowns, even if the virus is endemic. Testing is the bottleneck.

Testing is a bottleneck which is why you need as many testing venues as possible including mail-in at home tests for the more rural areas.

The US isn’t South Korea it’s population density is drastically different as well as its geographical scale which makes viral protein and RNA tests much harder to conduct.

At this point social distancing and a multi phase testing plan will be required which will undoubtedly include field AB testing to reduce the load on testing facilities.

AB testing also provides additional valuable data points including a more accurate infection figures since it can come out positive as long as the antibodies remain in your system.

Big chance of getting false-positive. People will think they're clear and won't distance themselves from vulnerable. While they may be carriers.

That would not be the effect of a false positive.

In any case, these tests would be used to confirm or rule out SARS-CoV-2 as the cause of someone's symptoms. They wouldn't be used for routine screening of asymptomatic people.

I don't know why you are being down voted. The risk is for false-negative, but you are right that people might think this is going to clear them.

Even the manufacturer/supplier warns that: "Negative results do not preclude SARS-CoV-2 infection and should not be used as the sole basis for patient management decisions. Negative results must be combined with clinical observations, patient history, and epidemiological information."

They also indicate: "The sensitivity is 97.90 %, the specificity is 91.77%."

But when you read the technical document you realize that this was for a subset of patient. The real numbers are 88.7% and 90.6% respectively, and again these are for severe cases.

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