How would you test a COVID Test?

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Hello Ministry,

I know we all like testing and we test everything that we can get our hands on. In this COVID time I started to think how I would test a Covid Test, since on the one hand it is a really important part of the daily life at the moment and on the other hand I wanted to see how I could apply some testing principles and techniques to the process.

Have a look at it and please comment what test you would add :smiley:

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Nice concept!

Iā€™ve been wondering if you test this, how about the environment you are currently in?
Letā€™s say you do a test in 40Ā°C or in a freezer at -10Ā°C does it have an impact? :open_mouth:

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Have that point in the short article. It was one of the first things that I thought of when thinking of the test. I mean it work on my maschine can be translated to it work in my perfect conditions :smiley:

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I think, much like the ā€œelevatorā€ test interview question, itā€™s too hard to not get tied up in domain knowledge problems. What I find interesting is a point I made yesterday to my help-meet about the test kit. I called it a ā€œmachineā€. She said itā€™s not a machine, which is perhaps valid because it has no moving parts. But your wrist-watch (of any type) is a computer, it just may or may not have a lot of moving parts, or it may have a microcontroller or it may have a general purpose processor. Every wrist-watch is still a computer. The covid test is a precise instrument, just mass produced with the aim of protecting itā€™s function against the user to achieve some level of accuracy. So testing that accuracy will always be out of scope for us.

The home test kits are machines, they just use chemical action. and so itā€™s no surprise that the use instructions are very careful around all mechanical steps that reduce chemical contamination or interference. As an engineer, I find the instructions the most fascinating and the most testable part of the entire thing. Intended instructions are written so as to make the results uniformly reliable. The kits available here look identical, but work differently, so that was interesting too.

  • I kind of have to drop some domain knowledge in here though, the lateral flow test (the ones distributed in the UK uses a swap technique , which is a user barrier, but improves early detection.) is not the only ā€œsimpleā€ test. Another test kit called LAMP is also possible, but no marketed. It uses the same amplification technology as the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) lab tests, but, and here is the shocker, it takes half the time of a PCR, and you can technically do it on a stove-top with a thermometer and a pan. Iā€™m sharing this little point, because, whenever we test anything, we have to use comparisons to other similar systems in how we judge not just the visible quality, but also efficiency.
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