Kull -> RE: OT: Corona virus (3/13/2020 5:48:42 PM)
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The FDA approved the test that will be run by Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche's automated testing machines. The machines are already in 100 American laboratories. Roche's diagnostic machine will be able to run up to 4,000 tests per day and will give doctors the result in less than four hours. Excerpting the quote from my earlier post, let's have fun with numbers!!! The new Covid-19 test can be run (potentially) 4000 times a day on 100 different lab machines, which works out to some pretty impressive totals. For example, South Korea has performed 249,000 tests as of today, but in the US, the new Roche test could exceed that in a single day: 4000 x 100 = 400,000) Of course that's ludicrously optimistic - you'd need to have 400,000 samples in those labs first, and every sample has to be physically taken from a single individual. Plus, are those machines doing nothing else but Covid-19 testing? Of course not, there must be all sorts of tests going on every day, or the 100 machines wouldn't already exist. But just for grins, lets imagine that you COULD run all 100 at max output for as long as needed. How long WOULD it take to test the entire US population? 825 days That sounds ridiculous, obviously, but when you hear people talking about "half the population" coming down with this thing, it should be obvious that testing every symptomatic individual is not going to be feasible if/when we start seeing really large numbers. "Flattening the curve" is overly simplistic. It's not just breathing machines or hospital beds - the current patient-to-doctor methodology underlying our medical system is not capable of processing Covid-19 on a per-person basis. The vast majority of people who get this or think they might have it will just have deal with it themselves. Like the flu or the common cold. And think about that for a moment. Both of those have almost exactly the same symptoms as Covid-19, so people with those illnesses will be pouring into the same medical system, looking for Covid tests and more. If this isn't planned for, it's going to be a real trainwreck.
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