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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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A poster in a prevjous thread brought up the use of mass testing as a potential solution to the Covid crisis. He proposed testing everyone every two weeks which would certainly help but is likely to be very expensive and difficult to organize.
However...
What if there was a simple test, involving nothing more than a cotton swap of saliva that you could do at home, process at home in 30 minutes using a machine that should cost less than a toaster and that gave a simple colour change indiction of a positive result?
Fantasy? Nope, the test exists today. All that's needed is the will to package it into mass-market home test kits & build the simple heaters (65C for 30 mins) that it needs.
Is it as accurate as the rt-pcr tests used today, no. Is it accurate enough to drastically reduce the risk of covid spreading, yes. In tests, it's 90% accurate with the errors tending towards false positive rather than false negative which is what you want in that situation.
Get a positive home test, isolate & book a lab test for confirmation.
Get a negative home test, good to go.
Make it mandatory to have a home test result stored on your phone within the last 24 hours to undertake high-risk activities (public transport, social venues etc.)
If we can spend literally billions keeping things closed, why are we spending nothing investigating things that will let us get them open again?
(For avoidance of doubt this is different from the 90 min doctors-office test the gov. was muttering about earlier this month)
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"A poster in a prevjous thread brought up the use of mass testing as a potential solution to the Covid crisis. He proposed testing everyone every two weeks which would certainly help but is likely to be very expensive and difficult to organize.
However...
What if there was a simple test, involving nothing more than a cotton swap of saliva that you could do at home, process at home in 30 minutes using a machine that should cost less than a toaster and that gave a simple colour change indiction of a positive result?
Fantasy? Nope, the test exists today. All that's needed is the will to package it into mass-market home test kits & build the simple heaters (65C for 30 mins) that it needs.
Is it as accurate as the rt-pcr tests used today, no. Is it accurate enough to drastically reduce the risk of covid spreading, yes. In tests, it's 90% accurate with the errors tending towards false positive rather than false negative which is what you want in that situation.
Get a positive home test, isolate & book a lab test for confirmation.
Get a negative home test, good to go.
Make it mandatory to have a home test result stored on your phone within the last 24 hours to undertake high-risk activities (public transport, social venues etc.)
If we can spend literally billions keeping things closed, why are we spending nothing investigating things that will let us get them open again?
(For avoidance of doubt this is different from the 90 min doctors-office test the gov. was muttering about earlier this month)
"
So can you buy one of these test kits in Boots yet ? |
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By (user no longer on site)
over a year ago
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"
So can you buy one of these test kits in Boots yet ?
Not sure about Boots but Superdrug and BUPA and many many other places . . .  "
What about the toaster? |
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By *atEvolutionCouple
over a year ago
atlantisEVOLUTION. Stoke |
"
So can you buy one of these test kits in Boots yet ?
Not sure about Boots but Superdrug and BUPA and many many other places . . .
What about the toaster?"
Nope. You can't buy Covid testing kits from a Toaster.  |
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The UK seems to have made it its business ordering test kit that's not approved or doesn't work.
With so many businesses having been closed, it may have been ideal for them to have helped with more testing. The government wanted it to be controlled by the large companies that it was outsourced to. If the kit is approved, it's reasonable for people to get their own if it's cheap. 90% accurate sounds like it would alarm some authorities |
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