Comment by godtoldmetodoit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godtoldmetodoit | Hacker News Reader

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godtoldmetodoit

I've been wondering why there hasn't been more programs to test representative samples of individuals, just like a political poll.

If I was in a Governor's or Mayor's shoes right now and I know there aren't enough resources to test everyone, I'd want some data like that to work with to make policy decisions.

While you are in the process of opening things back up, you keep a close eye on your daily/weekly representative sample numbers to see if anything needs to be dialed back. It gives you much closer to immediate feedback.

I suppose the immediate problem is getting a hold of a representative sample of people willing to be tested, but that feels solvable. I'm sure I'm not the first one to think of it, just curious why it isn't being done, as it feels immensely useful (maybe this is just the 538 political nerd in me wanting virus polls?).

The confidence intervals are wide enough it wouldn't be very useful. If you sample 1000 people and get 0 positives, the 95% confidence interval is 0% - 0.36%. If you're the governor of Illinois, with a population of 12.67 million people, that upper bound equates to 45,612 people: far, far too many to handle with contact tracing and isolation. So you need to look to other metrics to make the decision about whether to issue or revoke a stay at home order.

So what are they looking at? Basically, if they have any evidence of community transmission, they need to issue the order or keep it in place. That means that if there are too many symptomatic people to even attempt contact tracing, you're not even close. Once you're low enough you can do contact tracing, you wait until you have a handful at most of symptomatic people you can't trace back to a known case. Until then, all you can do is keep the stay at home order in place, buy/beg/borrow/steal ventilators and PPE, and build testing and contact tracing capacity.

Seattle has been running a test like this. I believe they're allocating 300 tests per day.

https://scanpublichealth.org

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