Virus World

Verily is opening its own testing lab. The lab is in-house at the Google sibling company's South San Francisco headquarters. Verily, the life sciences arm of Google's parent company Alphabet, on Tuesday said it has set up its own coronavirus testing lab aimed at getting people faster results. The lab, located on the company's campus in South San Francisco, California, was built to run "several thousand" tests per day, Verily said. The announcement comes as COVID-19 cases have spiked, causing labs to return results at a slower clip. Facilities that used to take two to three days are now taking a week or longer.  

"When the pandemic hit, it became clear that we needed to rapidly establish a lab and to receive California state licensure and CLIA certification, which we have done," said Verily Head of Pathology Deb Hanks, referring to the state's standards for clinical labs. "We've established this lab to provide a focused specialty service with rapid turnaround time."  One way Verily says it's increasing testing capacity is by looking into "pooled" testing, or combining respiratory samples from several people and conducting one lab test on the sample set. The Verily facility will focus primarily on customers of the company's Healthy at Work program, aimed at helping businesses and schools get people back to offices or campus. 

Verily's efforts were the source of drama and confusion earlier during the pandemic, after President Donald Trump announced the federal government was working with Google on a coronavirus testing website. The tool, which was announced unexpectedly by the president, turned out to be a website that allows people to take a screener survey to see if they should go to testing stations for COVID-19. The screening website has drawn privacy scrutiny from lawmakers. In order to take the online screener, the site requires people to sign in using a Google account. Democratic senators have pressed Verily about the issue, but in April, Verily indicated it would keep the requirement for security and authentication reasons.

Even as the United States ramped up coronavirus testing from about 100,000 per week in mid-March to more than 5 million per week in late July, the country fell further behind in stemming the spread of the virus. Now, diagnostics experts, public health officials, and epidemiologists are calling for a radical shift in testing strategy: away from diagnosing people who have symptoms or were exposed and toward screening whole populations using faster, cheaper, sometimes less accurate tests. By making it possible to identify and isolate infected individuals more quickly, proponents say, the shift would slow the virus' spread, key to safely reopening schools, factories, and offices. “America faces an impending disaster,” says Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Testing, he says, needs to focus on “massively increasing availability of fast, inexpensive screening tests to identify asymptomatic Americans who carry the virus. Today, we are conducting too few of these types of tests.” Rebecca Smith, an epidemiologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), agrees. To stop outbreaks from overwhelming communities, she says, “we need fast, frequent testing,” which could mean faster versions of existing RNA tests or new kinds of tests aimed at detecting viral proteins. But researchers say the federal government will need to provide major financial backing for the push.

Today, COVID-19 testing relies primarily on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a technique to amplify the virus' genetic material, making it easy to detect. If administered properly, such tests are highly accurate, spotting positive cases nearly 100% of the time. That accuracy is vital for decisions about treating individual patients. But PCR tests cost about $100 each, require specialized machinery and reagents, and typically take at least 1 to 2 days to return results. The recent increase in coronavirus cases across the United States has added to the delay, pushing wait times to 2 weeks in some places. While they wait, people who are infected but don't yet know it may continue to interact with others and spread the virus. And if their infective period ends before they get their results, isolating them won't help. “It's like calling the fire department after your house burns to the ground,” says A. David Paltiel, an operations research expert at the Yale School of Public Health. “You can't play catch up with this virus.” A 24 July preprint on medRxiv underscored the downsides of slow tests. Shixiong Hu, a researcher with the Hunan Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and his colleagues followed 1178 people who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 from January to April and tested their 15,648 contacts, defined as people who had been within 1 meter of a positive person between 2 days before and 14 days after the person's symptoms began. Based on which contacts were infected and when, the researchers estimated that people were most likely to spread the virus 1.8 days before the onset of symptoms. The finding suggests testing people only when they show symptoms and giving them test results days to weeks later does little to slow viral spread, says Daniel Larremore, an applied mathematician at the University of Colorado, Boulder...