Flutterby™! : WA vs US Federal COVID-19 response

I'm still pissed off at the New York Times for all sorts of reasons, and I don't like using up my paywall reads even so. You've probably already seen this article linked to by other people, but this is very very much worth a read.

A while back I gave away a copy of Eva Harris's book "A Low-Cost Approach to PCR". I got it back in the days when "computational biology" was the next big thing; it was written with a sense towards hacking together diagnostics labs in developing nations, building centrifuges from blenders, repurposing record turntables for agitating samples, and so forth. I didn't go anywhere with it because it seemed like the hazardous materials handling of known mutagens with mercury in them was a little above my "doing gene sequencing in my kitchen" sort of cavalier approach to safety.

At any rate, I'm kinda wondering if a culture of publishing electrophoresis prints would be a good thing, or just raise the noise level.

‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response, about how Washington State health officials identified COVID-19 samples early.