And we also have deployed a team from Walter Reed that over the last t — COVID-19 testing

"Even once a test is working beautifully in the lab, it still faces an arduous journey to mass usage. The first challenge is to verify performance, because quality can vary. “It’s a Wild West out there for assay development,” says Catharina Boehme, chief executive officer of the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND), a non-profit group in Geneva that is collaborating with the World Health Organization and the University Hospitals of Geneva to assess hundreds of SARS-CoV-2 testing options. Most RT-PCR-based tests that FIND has evaluated perform just as well as the gold standard does, whereas antigen tests have so far fallen short of expectations, Boehme says. Another hurdle is scaling up the assays for mass production. Given this constraint, Boehme thinks it is unrealistic that all the new tests will be deployed before the end of the year — although a small number might be. But once they are available, they could work alongside the gold standard to push countries closer to the target of millions of tests per week — and prepare the world for the next pandemic."

"Peter Alexander: How are non-symptomatic professional athletes getting tests while others are waiting in line and cant get them?"

"I think I read yesterday a report that we’ve done more than everybody — every other country — combined, we’ve tested more than every other country in the world even put together."

"Another way researchers are trying to bring testing to the masses is to devise assays that could be used in temporary testing facilities, drive-through testing centres and even in people’s homes. At least two teams are taking advantage of the gene-editing technology CRISPR to power such tests. For example, researchers led by Zhang have developed a coronavirus assay that can be run in a single test tube in about an hour4. But it still requires heating the sample to about 65 °C, and it’s not as sensitive as a PCR-based assay. “That’s okay, because it’s much easier to use,” Zhang says. When tested multiple times on samples from 12 people infected with coronavirus, the assay detected the virus on nearly every occasion. The test builds on an approach that Zhang co-developed in 2017, called SHERLOCK5, which relies on the ability of the CRISPR machinery to home in on specific genetic sequences. Researchers program a guide molecule to latch on to a particular stretch of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. If the guide molecule finds a match, a CRISPR enzyme generates a signal that can be detected either as a fluorescent glow or as a dark band on a paper dipstick (see ‘Cut and detect’). On 6 May, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a SHERLOCK coronavirus assay for emergency use. The test is made by biotechnology firm Sherlock BioSciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts (of which Zhang is a co-founder), and the company has partnered with a manufacturer to mass-produce the kits. (See also ‘Coronavirus assays assessed’.)"

"Guozhen Liu, a bioengineer at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, says that technologies such as CRISPR could be “a game changer” in the current pandemic. Thanks to their ability to quickly and precisely identify genetic snippets, these approaches “can find a needle in a haystack”, Liu says. They use different reagents from RT-PCR-based assays — useful when there are shortages of chemical supplies for standard tests — and they can be designed to target any pathogen. For example, a team led by computational biologist Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute created rubber ‘chips’ about the size of a smartphone that can search 1,000 samples for a single virus, or 5 samples for a panel of 169 viruses that are known to infect humans8."

"This is putting thousands of health workers at risk, and essentially abandoning hundreds of them to catch the virus, to spread the virus, and in many cases to die. The experts in a health emergency are, of course, the health workers. But they are silenced by the Tories and the NHS bosses — threatened with dismissal if caught telling the truth to the public they serve — as if we were living in Stalinist China."