I was attempting to illustrate the absurdity of the past month and a half by performing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, not provide a detailed business plan for launching a biotech startup. FFS
I never claimed that bench space was a universal constant, nor that hiring personnel is effortless. Rather, I attempted to make it clear that from both scientific and logistical perspectives the barrier to effective testing is quite low.
The point of the instrument throughput calculation was to make it clear that instrument availability can't possibly be the limiting factor because a single low-end one that many academic labs already have on hand can facilitate an incredible number of tests each day. That's important because you can't depend on being able to procure new instrumentation in a timely manner during a crisis so any estimates ought to assume that you're stuck with whatever you already have.
We see reagent shortages reported in the news, but that can't possibly be the limiting factor either because (as far as I know) only common chemicals (plus primers and probes) are required. (Actually you could probably dispense with the probes if you were willing to run an awful lot of gels, but that would further complicate the pipeline and require more labor so better not.)
So then we might suppose that personnel and training is the bottleneck, but that can't be it either because the government has deep pockets and just about any practicing molecular biologist is over qualified to perform such a trivial procedure.
Looked at this way, it should be abundantly clear that US policy is entirely to blame.
I also never said to use scraps of paper in lieu of proper record keeping. The obvious interpretation of what I wrote is to go line by line in a lab notebook, which is something I have in fact done before (obviously not on the scale described though). It works quite well in the long term provided that your serial numbers incorporate either a day or a page number and are strictly sequential. It's hardly the only way to go about it; I only mentioned it because the original post that I responded to explicitly called out record keeping as a necessarily time consuming and complicated part of the process. I was illustrating that once again, that is only true when complying with existing US regulations.
What was described above wasn't "US Administrative Bureaucracy" so much as "this is how busy labs are run." It can be challenging to understand that if you're coming from a small research lab where QA/QC boils down to recalibrating when you feel like it, and sample records are maintained by transcribing loose paper into Excel.
The bureaucratic aspects are to ensure you don't mix up the large volume of samples, and the quantitative QA/QC metrics are needed to objectively esablish what level of error is considered acceptable. Good record-keeping and QA/QC are all necessary when you're dealing with healthcare, particularly largescale healthcare.
That doesn't mean US policy or the administration's handling of this crisis was anything close to acceptable, but the issues there are pretty far removed from routine laboratory sample check-in and record-keeping.
I never claimed that bench space was a universal constant, nor that hiring personnel is effortless. Rather, I attempted to make it clear that from both scientific and logistical perspectives the barrier to effective testing is quite low.
The point of the instrument throughput calculation was to make it clear that instrument availability can't possibly be the limiting factor because a single low-end one that many academic labs already have on hand can facilitate an incredible number of tests each day. That's important because you can't depend on being able to procure new instrumentation in a timely manner during a crisis so any estimates ought to assume that you're stuck with whatever you already have.
We see reagent shortages reported in the news, but that can't possibly be the limiting factor either because (as far as I know) only common chemicals (plus primers and probes) are required. (Actually you could probably dispense with the probes if you were willing to run an awful lot of gels, but that would further complicate the pipeline and require more labor so better not.)
So then we might suppose that personnel and training is the bottleneck, but that can't be it either because the government has deep pockets and just about any practicing molecular biologist is over qualified to perform such a trivial procedure.
Looked at this way, it should be abundantly clear that US policy is entirely to blame.
I also never said to use scraps of paper in lieu of proper record keeping. The obvious interpretation of what I wrote is to go line by line in a lab notebook, which is something I have in fact done before (obviously not on the scale described though). It works quite well in the long term provided that your serial numbers incorporate either a day or a page number and are strictly sequential. It's hardly the only way to go about it; I only mentioned it because the original post that I responded to explicitly called out record keeping as a necessarily time consuming and complicated part of the process. I was illustrating that once again, that is only true when complying with existing US regulations.