Bill Gates had a section on testing in his recent Gates notes....

Bill Gates had a section on testing in his recent Gates notes. I've copy pasted that section below.

There’s a lot of confusion about testing for COVID-19, and it’s important to be clear about what’s working well and what isn’t.
There are three different instances that involve testing for the virus. One is if you’re severely symptomatic—sick enough to go to a clinic or hospital—and your doctor needs to know how to treat you. Early on, the U.S. health care system had trouble getting enough tests for these cases, but that problem has largely been solved.
The second instance is if you have only mild symptoms, or none at all but you might have been exposed to the virus. In this case, you need to know if you are infected, so you can isolate yourself and protect others. Even if you don’t have symptoms or haven’t developed them yet, you can still spread COVID-19, so you need to get your test results right away.
Unfortunately, the U.S. is lagging badly in this area; tests often take several days to deliver results, rendering them essentially useless. We need to invest in better tests and more efficient systems for processing them so people can act quickly to protect their loved ones and their communities. Just last week, there was some good news on this front when the FDA approved the first diagnostic that people can use at home, without sending a sample to a lab. It works a lot like an at-home pregnancy test.
Then there’s the third use for testing: disease surveillance. Despite what the name seems to imply, this has nothing to do with watching people. Instead, disease surveillance is what allows public health experts to estimate the number of cases in a location and the rate at which new infections are occurring. Armed with this information, government leaders can make informed decisions about the best ways to stop the virus from spreading.
If you have the first two testing instances covered, you should have the population-level data you need to do disease surveillance. But—as we’re seeing in the U.S.—if you don’t know who might be infected, you can’t do it well.
We’ve been funding a local effort in Seattle to fill this gap. Thousands of people in the area—some symptomatic, some not—have filled out a brief online survey, conducted a self-test by swabbing the tip of their nose, and sent the results in for processing. A similar effort is under way in the San Francisco area.
One cool innovation that’s making this work possible is the ability to let people collect their own samples by swabbing the tip of their nose. (A study that we funded was the first to show that this is just as accurate as the standard nasopharyngeal swab.) If you’ve ever had one of the nasopharyngeal tests, you know how uncomfortable they are—and how they can make you cough or sneeze, which is bad news with a respiratory virus like COVID-19 because it increases risks to healthcare workers. With any luck, the days of the jam-a-stick-to-the-back-of-your-throat COVID-19 test will soon be over.
What’s important about the Seattle and San Francisco projects is that they’re helping researchers see how the virus spreads. And in the future, the system for sending out and processing test kits will be useful for detecting other new pathogens that might arise.
The testing challenge is especially acute in sub-Saharan Africa. Many countries there can’t afford the most accurate tests. And they don’t have the infrastructure to conduct surveillance studies, so policymakers aren’t working with the most up-to-date information.
This is the kind of problem that innovation excels at solving. Several companies are working on rapid tests that could be produced by the tens of millions. One is the British company LumiraDx, which has created a device that’s roughly the size of a thick cell phone, with a card reader at one end. A health care worker takes a sample from a patient, inserts it into the machine, and gets results within 15 minutes. After removing any personal information that could identify the patient, the device uploads the results to a central server. Analysts then use the data to follow the disease in real time, giving policymakers up-to-the-minute information on where to focus prevention and treatment efforts.
Our foundation is part of an effort to deploy an initial supply of 5,000 readers in 55 countries throughout Africa. Although that’s a relatively small number for such a large area, it’s a good start. And the benefits may not be limited to COVID-19: In the future, the same machines could be used to test for HIV, tuberculosis, and other diseases.
Still other companies are working on ways to make the highly sensitive tests that are in use now faster and cheaper, and to expand the manufacturing of less-sensitive but cheaper tests from tens of thousands a day to many millions a day. The pace of innovation in this field really is impressive and is going to benefit everyone.