The speaker discusses the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the significant challenges faced due to the lack of testing capacity. They recount how their clinic in Everett, Washington, identified the first case of domestic COVID-19 in the United States. The speaker emphasizes the impact of the pandemic on society, economy, and mental health, with over 1.2 million deaths in the United States alone in the past three years.
The speaker then discusses their work in developing new methods for testing, which included studies demonstrating that nasal swabs collected by patients were as effective as nasopharyngeal swabs collected by healthcare workers. These findings led to the development of home antigen tests, which were distributed for free to households in the first three months of 2020.
The speaker concludes by discussing the potential for the next pandemic and the importance of faster, better, and scaled testing. They envision a future where testing can be done quickly and efficiently, making it easier to identify infected individuals and protect vulnerable populations.
1. The speaker identified the first case of domestic COVID-19 in the United States in their clinic in Everett, Washington.
2. The Everett Clinic is a large multi-specialty clinic located in the Puget Sound basin, with 30 clinics scattered across Puget Sound and sees more than a third of a million patients a year.
3. Everett was also the first city where the first patient had been hospitalized with COVID-19 a month earlier after returning from China.
4. The speaker identified the first person who had not traveled outside the United States with COVID-19.
5. The speaker knew that COVID was spreading undetected in their community and acknowledged the trouble they were in.
6. At the early stage of the pandemic, the only way to be tested for COVID was through the public health laboratory, which had limited capacity.
7. The speaker was aware that testing was key to managing the pandemic and that nasopharyngeal swabs were the only approved method to test people at the beginning of the pandemic.
8. The speaker led several studies that lowered the barriers to testing and made testing safer and more comfortable for patients.
9. The speaker demonstrated that nasal swabs collected by the patients themselves were just as effective as diagnosing COVID as using the long nasopharyngeal swabs collected by health care workers.
10. The speaker showed that foam and polyester swabs were equivalent to the specialized swabs they were using, providing an inexpensive material to make additional swabs.
11. The speaker demonstrated that polyester swabs placed in a dry tube without transport media could also be used for testing.
12. The speaker explained that the ability of patients to self-collect a nasal swab and the use of inexpensive polyester materials to manufacture swabs revolutionized the COVID testing process.
13. The speaker mentioned that home antigen tests became available in November 2020 and that 350 million of these tests were distributed to households free of charge by the government in the first three months.
14. The speaker explained that testing enables the sick to isolate quickly and seek treatment and that those who've been exposed can test themselves and help protect vulnerable populations.
15. The speaker discussed the vision of a future where an easy way to make an appointment for a test will be available, no matter which healthcare organization a person belongs to, and whether they have insurance or not.
16. The speaker explained the concept of miniaturized PCR tests, where each bubble represents a single PCR, and the volume is one tenth of the current volume it takes to run a PCR.
17. The speaker demonstrated that with this miniaturization, they were able to run many more PCR tests at the same time and that this miniaturization allows for the processing of thousands or tens of thousands of PCRs simultaneously.
18. The speaker showed that with this new methodology, a hundred thousand PCRs can be processed every 24 hours.
19. The speaker concluded that with the next pandemic, testing can be cheaper, faster, and easier at a scale that is completely unrecognizable from the early days of the pandemic.