• the COVID tests

    From RichD@21:1/5 to All on Tue Mar 23 12:37:30 2021
    The first COVID cases occurred in China, Dec. 2019.
    The first tests were developed in about six weeks.
    How did they do that?

    --
    Rich

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  • From dlzc@21:1/5 to RichD on Wed Mar 24 06:48:17 2021
    On Tuesday, March 23, 2021 at 12:37:32 PM UTC-7, RichD wrote:
    The first COVID cases occurred in China, Dec. 2019.
    The first tests were developed in about six weeks.
    How did they do that?

    Starting with analysis of the virus.

    https://www.google.com/search?q=covid-19+test++site%3Anih.gov&lr=&as_qdr=all&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2020%2Ccd_max%3A2%2F29%2F2020&tbm=
    ...several papers between January 2020 and February 2020 regarding COVID-19 testing.

    You'd think they did this sort of analysis all the time, or something. They even developed an mRNA vaccine for the Zika virus, but it died out before it could be used en masse.

    David A. Smith

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  • From mroussel@shaw.ca@21:1/5 to RichD on Wed Mar 24 09:26:11 2021
    On Tuesday, March 23, 2021 at 1:37:32 PM UTC-6, RichD wrote:
    The first COVID cases occurred in China, Dec. 2019.
    The first tests were developed in about six weeks.
    How did they do that?

    --
    Rich

    Decades of research on virology, on mRNA isolation and amplification, on sequencing, ... When scientists say that basic science matters, this is an outstanding example.

    What do you need to do to develop a test for a virus?
    1. Isolate the virus. Lots of basic research done over a very long period of time has made us very good at this.
    2. Sequence the virus' genome. We've had a few decades of experience at amplifying and sequencing mRNA, which involves a lot of steps optimized by many, many scientists working in many, many labs around the world, eventually leading to kits that can be
    bought off the shelf to do all of the necessary operations (assuming you have a normally equipped biochemistry lab). Most of the companies in this business are themselves, in one way or another, spinoff companies from university labs.
    3. Nail down a protocol for repeating this with samples obtained from the field so that it's reliable and repeatable in any suitably equipped lab. Any virology lab has tons of experience with this kind of optimization.

    Every single step of this process was pioneered in a university lab somewhere, and most of them were refined in these places or in spinoff companies from university labs. All of that basic research carried out over decades made us ready to develop
    testing protocols for Covid-19.

    Marc R. Roussel
    Alberta RNA Research and Training Institute

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