The U.S. community is calling for a radical change in virus detection strategies

BEIJING, Aug. 4 (Xinhua Long Yun) Science website reported on August 3rd that although the United States has increased the detection of new coronavirus to more than 5 million cases per week, but in curbing the spread of the virus, the United States is still a "post-life." Experts, public health
and epidemiologists are calling for a radical change in testing strategies, using faster, cheaper but perhaps less accurate tests for collective screening to detect and isolate infected people more quickly and slow the spread of the virus.
, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, said: "The new crown pneumonia disaster is approaching the United States. New coronavirus detection requires extensive access to fast and inexpensive screening tests to detect asymptomatic patients carrying the virus. But the researchers say the federal government needs to provide financial support for the change in testing strategy.
, the new coronavirus detection relies primarily on polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique that amplifies the virus's genetic material and makes it easy to detect. Such tests are highly accurate and critical to the decision to treat individual patients, but are costly, professional, slow to produce results, can delay illness and exacerbate outbreaks.
, based on the contact and duration of the infection, the researchers believe that people infected with neo-coronary pneumonia are most likely to start spreading the virus 1.8 days before symptoms appear. Daniel Laremore, an applied mathematician at the University of Colorado Boulder, said the findings show that testing people only when they develop symptoms and giving them test results after days to weeks is not helpful in slowing the outbreak. His team simulated the benefits of repeated antigen testing. The accuracy of antigen detection is not as good as that of traditional detection methods, but after increasing the test frequency, the multi-wheel test results can make up for the lack of sensitivity. This is confirmed by a July 31 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine by researcher David Patil of the Yale School of Public Health.
July 16, the Rockefeller Foundation released a massive testing program and called on the federal government to spend $75 billion to ensure 30 million screening and diagnostic tests are conducted nationwide each week.
fact, even with federal funding, extensive screening programs are expensive. Patil's study estimates that the cost of testing may be beyond the reach of many schools and businesses. But he added: "For the country, the investment will be far less than the economic stopping losses caused by controlling the outbreak." "