Virus hunting in California reveals very different data and why testing really (really) matters, writes Michael Lewis
09 May 2020 - 08:00Word got out here that nasal swabs were the only thing standing between Northern California and a lot of coronavirus testing, and people with a talent for figuring out things began to figure things out. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, flew a plane full of medical supplies from China to the University of California at San Francisco Medical Centre, and some functional though less-than-ideal nasal swabs were happily among them.
DeRisi is an infectious disease specialist and co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub in San Francisco. I’ve been following his work and have already written about how, in the first three weeks of March, he used a volunteer labour force of 200 graduate students to build the fastest big coronavirus testing lab in the US from scratch — only to find that an absence of nasal swabs left him little to test.
It took Harmon and a venture capitalist also living in Bolinas three weeks to do for 1,400 California communists what the US government and the big lab testing companies say they still can’t do for 100 US senators: test everyone, fast. It was as if someone had thrown the pieces to seven different jigsaw puzzles into one box. It has charming Victorian houses; less charming housing developments; and brutalist, densely packed apartment buildings. It has people living on the streets.
Havlir, an Aids researcher, had earned the trust of the locals over many years of working with them to control that disease. Walking around you got a sense of the wariness she’d had to overcome. “The departments of public health are operating in a permanent mindset of scarcity,” says DeRisi. “They aren’t doing any of this sort of sampling.”
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