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For the past In a few months, almost every headline that begins with “coronavirus tests” has made my heart sink.
Rather than follow the lead of nations like South Korea, which long ago recognized that widespread testing is the cornerstone of an effective pandemic response, Western governments were initially slow to commit to increasing testing capacity. As poor test numbers made headlines, some, like the UK, tried to massage those numbers to give the mirage they were making more progress than they were. In the United States, President Donald J. Trump took an even more extreme tactic, proposing that the country “slow down testing” to suppress the numbers of reported cases.
None of that worked. By playing politics with coronavirus test numbers and then getting caught, governments undermined public faith in their data. But they also distracted us all from what, in many respects, has been a wildly successful scientific effort to develop, scale up and deploy coronavirus tests around the world. While the political history of coronavirus testing is far from edifying, scientific history offers much more hope.
Let’s start from the beginning. The first batch of unexplained and alarming pneumonia cases, later revealed to be Covid-19, was reported to the World Health Organization on December 31.2019. On January 10, 2020, Chinese scientists shared with the world the first draft of the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Within a week, scientists at the German Infection Research Center in Berlin had used that sequencing data to develop the first test, a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, capable of detecting specific genetic sequences unique to the new coronavirus. .
And so, less than a month after the first case was reported, the first laboratory tests for SARS-CoV-2 were ready for use. Such a fast timeline would have been almost incomprehensible just 10 years ago. Rather, it took nearly six months to develop the first PCR test for the virus behind the SARS outbreak, SARS-CoV-1, which swept through China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore in 2002 and 2003, almost becoming a pandemic. world. of your own.
Once the technology was available to test the virus, the focus shifted to putting those tests into play. Having learned from their past experiences, the nations of East Asia led the way. By the end of January, the goliath gene sequencing BGI Group had already distributed 50,000 coronavirus test kits in China. By the end of February, South Korea had processed more than 85,000 pieces of evidence.
Meanwhile, Western nations struggled to increase their testing capacity. The industry, however, responded quickly. Scientific and pharmaceutical giants like Thermo Fisher, QIAGEN, and Roche moved to increase manufacturing, and by the end of March, millions of new test kits were rolling off production lines and in circulation.
But test kits are useless without the staff and equipment to process them. In places like the UK and US, that processing was initially done primarily in hospitals and public health laboratories. But as March turned into April and the demand for testing grew, governments needed to find other ways to increase their testing capacity.
The UK government took an essentially British approach, asking its network of universities and research laboratories to support the national effort. Researchers and students responded to the call for volunteers en masse, putting aside their own research projects and PhDs. thesis to focus on testing Covid-19 samples. They used the equipment available in their labs, innovating to the best of their ability to maximize efficiency. Sir Paul Nurse, executive director of the Francis Crick Institute in London, compared it to the pandemic equivalent of the Little Ships of Dunkirk, referring to the fleet of hundreds of private vessels assembled to rescue Allied soldiers in northern France during the Second World War. Then, on April 22, the UK finished setting up the Lighthouse Laboratory Network, an association of high-capacity diagnostic laboratories capable of processing tens of thousands of samples every day.
With increased testing capacity, the challenge became finding ways to get testing to the people who need it. With most of its population trapped at home, the UK took a new approach: home delivery kits. In late April, Amazon announced that it would start using its vast network of warehouses, trucks and drivers to deliver Covid-19 tests to homes across the UK, allowing people to remain isolated in their homes if they thought they had the virus. Royal Mail, the UK postal service provider, also started helping to quickly deliver and return proofs for processing. These two partnerships allowed the UK to boost its testing program, nearly doubling the number of tests performed each day from around 30,000 to almost 70,000 in the space of less than a week.
The combination of more tests and improved public health measures dramatically reduced the percentage of tests that were positive or the test’s positivity rate. As of mid-April, that rate was above 15 percent in the US and the UK. As of early July, it had dropped below 9 percent in the US, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the UK and other parts of Europe, official websites indicated positivity rates below 5 percent, one of the WHO indicators that a Covid-19 outbreak is under control. Although the journey is far from over, with labs in the UK struggling to handle recent increases in demand for testing, and the efficiency and validity of testing from the Lighthouse lab network, alongside home kits, being questioned, progress has certainly been made since the slow start in March.
Now scientists have turned their attention to creating faster, cheaper, simpler, and more portable tests. We’re already seeing promising innovations on that front, from the simple coronavirus “saliva test” from Columbia University to a smartphone-powered test from Brunel, Lancaster and Surrey Universities in the UK. Both tests can give a result in just 30 minutes. and you don’t need to send it to a lab. Meanwhile, researchers in China and Israel are taking the first steps toward a Covid-19 breathalyzer test, which could give an immediate result in less than a minute.
Such a rapid, affordable, and portable test for SARS-CoV-2, even if not as accurate as traditional lab tests, could open up a world of opportunities to quarantine more effectively and quickly become the ultimate tool. powerful we have to stop the spread. of Covid-19 and return to “normal business”. With the growing number of cases in Europe and the US and recent antibody studies from London and New York indicating that the goal of herd immunity remains a long way off, these new tests offer a much-needed ray of hope.
Without a doubt, the launch of coronavirus testing has been far from a fairy tale. World leaders did not learn from the lessons of the past, they were inexcusably slow to prioritize expanding testing capacity, and they chose fights and prosecution over close international collaboration. Sadly, in both Russia and the US, we are already beginning to see the same political machinations in the search for a vaccine.
But take heart: if the history of coronavirus testing has shown us anything, it is what the global scientific community – academia, industry, and public bodies – can achieve when they come together and dedicate themselves to a common goal. Hopefully our political leaders will give our scientists the space and funding they need to move forward, and that they will listen to them a little earlier next time.
Aran Shaunak is a freelance journalist and science communicator with an academic background in human biology, pathology, and the spread of infectious diseases.
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