We’re more than a year into coronaplague. Saliva-based tests were developed back in the spring of 2020. At least here in Maskachusetts, children need COVID-19 tests before they can return to school following the sniffles and/or a trip to the cousins’ house (nearly every state in the U.S. is considered hazardous, even those with lower coronavirus infection rates than Massachusetts itself). Why isn’t is possible for children and adults to go to the local strip mall, spit, and have Kary Mullis‘s magic PCR machine give a thumbs up or thumbs down answer a few hours later?
(Is it the same answer as why we can’t buy Bounty or Formula 409? The U.S. managed to ramp up production of sophisticated aircraft during World War II (partial list). Why can’t we ramp up production of the tests that our governors and school bureaucrats are demanding? (separate issue as to whether there is any medical value to these tests! Last I checked with an MGH doctor, hospital care for COVID-19 patients still consisted primarily of “monitoring” and the care would be the same regardless of test result))
From the CVS MyChart site (November 26):
- there were five FDA-approved saliva-based tests as of mid-August
- BBC report on an Oxford study: “Most people are infectious only for about a week, but could test positive weeks afterwards.” (not great news for American enthusiasts of testing, since it now takes about a week of phoning/surfing to get a test and then another few days to get a result!)
If over-the-counter testing were widely available, people would start seeing how utterly unreliable testing results are, and how difficult they are to properly interpret.
If you had people trying to administer their own health monitoring, it would set an unpleasant precedent of suggesting that they can look after their own health individually better than if their health were looked after collectively.
Next you will have people start suggesting that just as one course of individual treatment under medical care can be deleterious to the individual’s health and to collective health, so a particular course of collective treatment may be deleterious both individually and collectively.
So the short answer is that we can’t make self-testing easier without subverting the dominant paradigm of the medical industrial complex.
M: I didn’t mean to suggest at-home or self-testing (since a PCR machine would be part of this, for one thing). Just a “show up and spit” service at enough locations that anyone who wanted to be tested could be tested.
philg,
everything I know about PCR testing I know from this ten year old paper I just read:
https://jcm.asm.org/content/47/9/2812
PCR testing results take 4 To 48 hours to do. Material costs are $15-$80 per test. I got no idea what leasing costs are for the centrifuges and pcr machines, but let’s assume it’s $1000/month. You need a lab tech to run the testing, a person to take the sample, and a person to take patient information and payment.
Doing a quick duckduckgo on Kary Mullis tells me that PCR machines are a bad diagnostic tool according to the inventor.
So the short answer to your follow up question is that there are no testing boutiques at the mall because they would be too costly, take too long to process, and are of questionable efficacy.
And your target audience, yourself and your neighbors, would not be caught dead at the mall. If I were to do this, I would do a delivery and pick up model where someone drives to your house, delivers the spit bag, oversees you spit right, and then takes the specimen to the lab.
Would you pay $300 out-of-pocket per test for this service? $500?
How would you charge $300 for something which costs $10 if anyone can do it himself?
The whole COVID testing scheme is an enormuous scam.
averros: Even if we accept that it is a scam, why can’t it be a saliva-based scam distributed among our nation’s many vacant strip malls?
Because there is a huge compliance and humiliation aspect to covid everything, jamming stuff up your nose is more obnoxious than spit on a stick. So everyone must jam something up the nose.
> Why isn’t is possible for children and adults to go to the local strip mall, spit, and have Kary Mullis‘s magic PCR machine give a thumbs up or thumbs down answer a few hours later?
Not enough PCR machine testing capacity is my best guess. I’ve been nose-swabbed 3x in 4 months at various drive-thru testing centers, all at hospital parking lots in drive-thru tents, which took less than 2 minutes for a nurse in a Hazmat suit and a face shield. I seriously doubt this country has enough PCR equipment and as a result the saliva-based tests are being used selectively (for sports stars, etc.)
How many PCR machines are there in Idaho, for example? So then you have to ship the spit sample elsewhere, wait, hope it was processed correctly, etc. There isn’t enough PCR capacity to test the population at that scale or it would have been done already. At one time in the not-too-distant past these devices were medical esoterica.
We don’t manufacture anything anymore, including the reagents. That’s the main reason.
Announced today a “breathalyzer” test. Probably no consumables available for that either.
The testing situation seems to be improving, at least in my area. My family was recently tested by the county in Northern California. The sample was collected using a Q tip inserted 3/4″ into the nose. Results in about 2 days. PCR-based test.
The main issues seem to be availability, cost and test turnaround time. Are saliva-based tests better on any of these factors?
What’s really needed is a cheap lateral flow assay (e.g. stick type pregnancy test, but for covid.). Pregnancy tests are cheap to make, so would a covid test.
Probably not cheap to sell, with the govt willing to throw dump trucks of money at the covid problem.