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@pjvanerp Ok, see if I can save some time later in the week with this ongoing nonsense: there is a group that claims that the original PCR assay developed by Victor Corman and Christian Drosten and validated by a collaboration of expert labs does not detect a new virus at all.


They argue that this is because the PCR primers also detect SARS

Fortunately, virologists know this ……viruses do indeed have parts in their genetic code that are conserved. That is actually used to classify them, and it can come in handy when designing a test to pick up all variants of a family of viruses.

See an example where this knowledge is used for design of a test that can pick up ALL coronaviruses https://t.co/NCoN3sMR14 . This type of test was also used when this virus first emerged.

So yes, when designing a test, selection of primers is key (as anyone involved in diagnostic virology knows) https://t.co/6p8sKCft7W In the paper, the sequence conservation among a highly selected sublineage of SARS-like viruses was used for primer selection.
When I say Nigeria’s cement policy has been a complete failure, this is exactly what I mean. The Goverment is tweeting this out without irony


Cement is an input. You can’t eat or drink it. On its own it’s useless. So as a government, if you decide to have a cement policy, the biggest mistake you can make is to set your success benchmark simply as increasing the amount of cement produced. But this is what Nigeria did

If you’re going to have a policy supporting the production of an input, the only sensible way to measure the success of that policy is to measure the things that that input goes into.

So you say - we want to have a cement policy to support the construction of x number of houses over x number of years. Or to build x amount of infrastructure. That is how you measure the success of a cement policy

But what did Nigeria do? The only measure of success has been we were producing x amount of cement in 19xx and now we are producing xx amount of cement in 20xx. Clap for yourselves, everyone go home. We even have a cement billionaire!