[Eridrus]

Thank you for what seems to be a breakthrough with implications beyond even the current outbreak.

I had a few questions though:

How do you compare this test to the Abbott machines? Obviously that test is faster, but how does that impact what we can do with it?

For 1m/day to be sufficient, do we need contact tracing programs to be able to find everybody who needs to be tested? How hard will it be to scale these programs?

[dvdt]

The Abbott machines are point-of-care devices that typically sit in doctor's offices. One really interesting use case I've heard of for the Abbott machines is to test all OB patients who are coming in to the clinic for routine care to make sure that they are COVID-19 negative. This allows the clinical staff to conserve PPE and use less burdensome precautions.

I think that where the Abbott machines might hit a wall is that they are one at a time, and they require Abbott's consumable test cartridge and device to run (think printer ink / printer). I don't have any firsthand knowledge, but I would anticipate that it is difficult to scale-up manufacturing of the devices rapidly enough to keep pace with the pandemic growth.

We absolutely need contact tracing to find everybody who needs to be tested. We're not working on scaling up contact tracing, but I think several people in the tech community are working on making that easier to perform at scale.

[andrewon]

Abott's test is cartridge based, isothermal and modular. There should be no technical reason why they cannot build a high throughput, random access version.

Whether this is the direction the company wants to spend their resources is another story.