A $5 Million Prize Spurs Competition for New Covid-19 Rapid Test 53
As countries race to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, just determining who's infected remains a major challenge. From a report: Large-scale testing is a crucial element in containing the virus, experts say, because many who contract it exhibit little to no symptoms. Without widespread testing, it's a daunting task to identify contagious individuals and isolate them. To help meet that challenge, the XPRIZE Foundation, which aims to spur technological and industry advancements, is offering a $5 million prize to develop a new Covid-19 rapid test. Competitors can enter until midnight Tuesday. Since July, 659 teams from 68 countries have registered. Currently, test results for the novel coronavirus can take up to two weeks, creating headaches for medical professionals, public-health experts and elected officials. Without the ability to test people often and with speedy results, many cases may go undetected, which can lead to new clusters of infections.
"We have, like everyone else around the globe, seen the impact this has had on mental health, physical health, bringing the wheels off of the economy," said Anousheh Ansari, chief executive officer of the XPRIZE Foundation. "We always look at innovation to solve grand challenges." Ansari and her family poured millions into funding the first XPRIZE in 2004 that launched the commercial space race. That $10 million prize brought in about $100 million of investment to the teams that competed, helping fuel what is now a more than $100 billion industry. Ansari's hope is that the Covid prize will seed a similar investment boom to fight a virus that has infected more than 27.3 million people and killed more than 892,000 worldwide.
"We have, like everyone else around the globe, seen the impact this has had on mental health, physical health, bringing the wheels off of the economy," said Anousheh Ansari, chief executive officer of the XPRIZE Foundation. "We always look at innovation to solve grand challenges." Ansari and her family poured millions into funding the first XPRIZE in 2004 that launched the commercial space race. That $10 million prize brought in about $100 million of investment to the teams that competed, helping fuel what is now a more than $100 billion industry. Ansari's hope is that the Covid prize will seed a similar investment boom to fight a virus that has infected more than 27.3 million people and killed more than 892,000 worldwide.
Until then... (Score:2, Insightful)
Testing (Score:1, Interesting)
Large-scale testing is a crucial element in containing the virus, experts say, because many who contract it exhibit little to no symptoms.
Such a deadly disease that you have to be tested for it to even know you have it.
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"This is the first virus that ever hit Earth that doesn't show symptoms and is contagious."
No, it's all of them.
Every virus infection is like that, if they killed the host immediately, before he could spread it, the virus would have gone extinct millennia ago.
All those who killed that fast are long gone.
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You could google Typhoid-Mary.
Ok, I'm isolating right now, so I graciously googled it for you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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"Such a deadly disease that you have to be tested for it to even know you have it."
You mean like Cholera, Ebola, Marburg etc where you can transmit it to hundreds of people before showing symptoms?
Yes, indeed, all Coronavirus-infections go in this same group, not only this one.
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Do not leave your house unless you have to. In about six months the vaccines will start arriving. Until then, stay inside.
Go ahead. The rest of us have work to do.
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It is an interesting time, things are really bad, so that the news agencies want to give us some good news. However this good news is often causing the normal folks to do harmful things.
The damage is long term. Don't expect things to get back to normal regardless who gets elected. We need a Vaccine that is proven safe and effective. Even if the formula is out now, it isn't proven safe and effective yet, so it will not be sent to the general public for a long time. Then when it is sent to the general pu
Re: Until then... (Score:1)
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Do leave your house to go for a walk or exercise in public areas where there aren't other people around (in suburbs or rural areas). Otherwise I agree.
Here is a rapid test for you... (Score:1, Insightful)
Which country has failed the hardest to respond to Covid-19?
America.
Which national leader has killed the most people through incompetence and malevolence?
Trump - 150,000 of 180,000 deaths are squarely on his hands.
Which country's nationals are still banned from international travel in fucking September due to widespread Covid-19 spread?
America.
Seriously what the fuck?!
1000 vs 100 which is daily death count is worse? (Score:4, Insightful)
Currently all of Europe put together averages less than 100 Covid-19 deaths a day, in part thanks to the fact that Americans a banned from travelling there. America averages more than 1000 deaths a day.
You might be thinking of April, when Europe's urban, dense cities contributed to massive spread of Covid-19.
Despite the fact that Europe is much more conducive to spread due to high rises with shared elevators etc they got their outbreak under control. Banning travel from irresponsible super spreader countries like the USA was a big part of that public health campaign.
But now Europe is opening back up again, testing and closing locally where needed, but broadly getting back to business.
Meanwhile America sits at home watching small businesses go under while we wait for Trump to figure out how to do his job, or at least stop making things worse.
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But the United States is 145th in population density. (75th of only the higher populated countries)
Social Distancing is part of the United States Demographics. However we are #1 in number of cases and deaths, 10th as you say in deaths per 100,000 people.
However we should be around 100th with the United States demographics. I am sorry this is just a case of poor management of the virus.
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At first glance, the 145th ranking would seem relevant - but the mobility of that population is really the influence. Having such a large geographic area with a well-developed road system and flight services is really how people transfer contagions.
They travel X hours easily and then attend a gathering. Even if there's empty space between origin and destination, the frequency of these travel/attendance events is the issue - and then the final step of a population that skips the immediate-locale mitigat
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Which is part of the problem. There isn't any rules around such gatherings. Lets packs 10,000 in a mega Church. Or but a thousand people protesting outside.
We should be allowed to go to church, and protest. However the lack of good leadership hasn't made sure that we do the following safely.
Re:Here is a rapid test for you... (Score:5, Informative)
"They travel X hours easily and then attend a gathering.
BTW, there's a new study about the Biker Rally.
The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event:
The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19
http://ftp.iza.org/dp13670.pdf [iza.org]
250.000 infected and around almost 13 billions of costs.
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Incorrect. The US is 10th in deaths per 100,000 population. You may have been thinking about Belgium, UK, Spain or Italy?
The AC didn't say anything in their comment about the US being #1 in deaths per capita, so I'm not sure if you were intentionally setting up a straw man argument but it is exactly what you did.
The AC asked which national leader killed the most people through incompetence and malevolence. As far as the worst responses to Covid-19 around the world, Trump certainly owns one of the worst responses to the crisis. You could argue some other countries such as Brazil had very poor responses, but the AC specifically
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Closes travel from China....
...for some people (mainly Chinese citizens, as if covid cared what passport you carried). Ignored Europe and the Middle East, even after massive outbreaks started there and Europe/Isreal were the sources of the New York area outbreaks.
Re:Here is a rapid test for you... (Score:4, Interesting)
Being that the outbreak came to the US from Europe. Yes it was Racist. Much like how rules and laws targeted at the LBGT community are suppose to help stop the spread of AIDs, is homophobic.
The reason why it is racist/homophobic is the fact that it was pointing blame on a group of people (who are usually the victims) and making seem like the villon, with the pretence that you are trying to stop an effect in which a group may be the first to be hit.
Except for saying. No Travel to China, it should had been No Travel to any country where COVID-19 infection rate is over x amount per 100,000 (this x amount should be given by experts in infectious diseases) Then having a quarantine period for anyone who enters the US. for 14 days.
China could had been blocked, but it was blocked my a mathematical formula. in Which China can recover after they have gone back to a rational number.
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You mean the Governor of an American State has the power to block visitors from entering their States.
Or just the fact New York City is a densely packed area. And a small group of infected people came in, when the world said it was a chinese problem.
Cuomo response wasn't perfect, however he made the best decision he could make with the information available at the time. Early on, there was a general belief of the following.
1. Masking was ineffective: This was shown wrong, shortly after the correlation bet
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On a side note, a vaccine isn't going to fix anything even if it does work.
The people on the right are not going to take as they don't want to be guinea pigs on version 0.1 of the vaccine. The government has to earn their trust on issues. (Seriously there are large law firms that just wo
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CDC has quietly revised those numbers from 150,000 to a little under 10,000 covid only deaths in the background. You are being lied to and are eating it up. Don't believe me or the news, look it up on the cdc website.
I did. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/... [cdc.gov]. There is no 'COVID-only' category, even. All deaths involving COVID-19: 174,626
Surprised it has taken this long (Score:1)
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I'm also surprised by this, and am assuming there must be more that the article isn't addressing. My company has been screening its employees with a 10 minute rapid test since early April. it costs us $35 a test, and that includes the test kit, the trained person to administer it, and that person's travel time to our designated test site.
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Why should you be surprised when the con artist has said we should do LESS testing because all this testing makes us look bad [businessinsider.com].
Even his failure of a son-in-law, Jared Kushner, sabotaged a nationwide testing program [vanityfair.com] because it would have helped blue states. This was after $52 million of taxpayer money was funneled to a United Arab Emirates company for the (possibly illegal) purchase o
What I envision (Score:2)
https://news.osu.edu/ohio-stat... [osu.edu]
A gadget like that which can be reprogrammed via a download to catch the next virus of the day. Want to get on the bus full of people, just prove you aren't sick first. It would make stopping a pandemic incredibly easier than what we are trying to do.
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I'm also surprised and disappointed. There's plenty of blame to go around: massive $$$ focused on cool war machines, little to pandemic threats; govt agencies dedicated to this threat, but only have a binder of Powerpoint slides to show for it, warm up examples in H1N1/SARS, and the miserable response of the current administration including state leadership.
We had the genome for this at the beginning of the year, and with broad, frequent, cheap testing, covid becomes manageable, at least to the point that
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The actual physical quantity of virus in your fantasy scenario is tiny. It has to be amplified millions of times to be detected, through a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). This involves an annealing-like procedure in which you repeatedly heat and cool the sample in the presence of special enzymes.
In contrast antibody tests measure your body's response to the virus, which is orders of magnitude larger and usually doesn't require any kind of amplification procedure. But antibody tests don't
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While you've laid out the challenges well, in fairness to the OP, there are technology and sensors in other fields that can detect things of the same small magnitude. We're all just wondering given the enormous potential damage in health and economically to society, why stronger efforts weren't directed towards rapid (instant), cheap, testing earlier on. Testing gets you safely through the period leading up to and through dispensing a vaccine.
I had a PCR test done back in June and got the results 8 days
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The difference in this scenario from other ones where you're detecting tiny concentrations of a substance is that a droplet of any bodily fluid is a witch's brew of organic molecules. A test needs to be both sensitive and discriminating, two goals that are hard to achieve together.
A sensitive reagent that reacts with a target molecule will also tend to react, albeit less strongly, with non-target ones. That's why test results are often reported as "titers" -- the greatest level of dilution that will achiev
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Imagine a test that is 98% accurate. 50 people gather after all testing negative and on average one of those people may be positive and infect the other 49 people
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What worries me is too much dependence on an inaccurate test. As you say, testing is useful and a 98% test used multiple times on a person should be fairly accurate but to allow people to ignore all health protocols based on one quick test doesn't seem like a solution.
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Peanuts (Score:2)
Maybe a nice incentive for university groups to showcase their experimental technology - but 5 Millions is FAR less than what is required to develop a certified test. Big Pharma will simply ignore it since probably every serious developer in these circles is working with a 500 Mil budget already, and these are the only guys who can actually bring something to market fast because they have all the knowledge and infrastructure bundled on site.
Don't forget: The XPrize lunar lander competition was scheduled to
slow, small, and nearsighted (Score:2)
In the continuing devolution of the XPRIZE brand, we now have a prize that far too late, is less than 1/100 of what the NIH and NSF government programs are, and is absurdly focused on not developing new technology. Really, $5M for a project like this is absurdly small, particularly when there is absolutely no need to convince investors of the value of a COVID test! The government programs have already gone through application, evaluation, launch, and first milestones. The commercial folks who started worki
Profits? (Score:2)
It seems like the potential profits from such an invention would be enough encouragement to get people to work on this.
Even if they were sold very cheaply, it seems like $5 million would be just a drop in the bucket.
A major motion picture has a $200 million budget (Score:4, Insightful)
Compare this $5 million prize to the cost of a major motion picture having a budget of $200 million (Tenet, released August 2020).
The XPRIZE Foundation offer for a worldwide rapid Covid-19 test is about 2.5% of the cost of this major motion picture. The XPRIZE Foundation offer amounts to less than 4 minutes of the 150 minute film.
Do we really want to fight a virus that has infected more than 27.3 million people and killed more than 892,000 worldwide, or do we want a couple hours of entertainment?