Antibody tests like (apparently) this one are already available and manufactured in large quantities. They can be purchased from Chinese suppliers today for $1-$2 per test.

As mentioned elsewhere, this type of test has low sensitivity for early case detection. In the first 7 days of an infection, less than 40% of patients have detectable antibody (IgM) levels. After 15 days, nearly 100% are detectable. So this test can be very helpful for detecting and quarantining older asymptomatic and mild cases, but are less effective at diagnosing new severe cases.

It's good to see more manufacturers crop up for these tests, though. Even if the test only detects 40% of new cases, that lets us cheaply and quickly get those 40% off the street and into quarantine before they can do much harm.

I'm working on importing respirators, surgical masks, and possibly test kits from China to San Francisco by the thousands or tens of thousands. It looks like I will be able to get them for between $0.20 and $0.50 each, both for surgical masks and for N95 respirators, with a lead time of 2 to 4 weeks for the respirators. I'm starting with orders of 2,000 each for the surgical masks and for respirators.

There also appear to be IgG/IgM test kits available for $2 each. I don't know whether US Customs will allow me to import them, though, because of FDA regulations. I'm going to try with a small order and see what happens.

I'd like to distribute half of these to hospitals, patients, and families of patients, and the other half to high-exposure members of the public to try to prevent superspreaders and to encourage people to actually wear the masks they have in public.

It appears that wearing even a surgical mask will reduce a person's chance of getting infected by 60-80%.[1] If everybody wore a mask all the time, this could drop COVID-19's R_0 from ~2.5 down to 0.5-1.0, which could stop the pandemic in its tracks.

There are a few tasks involved in this project, and some of my friends are helping me with them:

1. Distribution will require a lot of legwork. We should also show people how to use them properly, and how to adjust the metal strip so they form a tight seal on the face.

2. I'll fund the initial stages myself, but we'll need to do fundraising to get wider reach than a few thousand. We want to create a website and some marketing info to attract donations. Maybe a Gofundme or something.

3. Hospitals may have regulations or restrictions on what they can accept in terms of donations, so we should be contacting them and ensuring that our contributions can be used.

4. Handing them out in public might attract police attention if we don't have a permit. We'll need to address that.

5. Sourcing the masks is non-trivial -- many manufacturers have backlogs, or uncertified/sketchy products, or inflated prices. There are also trade-offs to be made in e.g. comfort vs fit vs price vs reusability vs filtration efficiency. Ideally, we would also be able to test masks upon arrival to verify their quality and effectiveness.

6. Public education is needed to convince people to actually wear them. There appears to be a common belief in the USA that surgical masks are ineffective and no better than no mask at all. This belief is unfortunate, and appears to be false. There is also advice from the WHO and CDC that discourages uninfected individuals from using masks preventatively, on account of the shortage of evidence showing efficacy in non-medical settings. This also appears to be poorly founded, as (a) the absence of evidence of effectiveness is not evidence of the absence of effectiveness, and (b) there *is* a small amount of evidence, and that evidence suggests (but does not prove) a large effect size.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2662657

Brain Workshop is a free, open-source program which can make you smarter. It implements the dual n-back task, which has been shown to improve people's performance on IQ tests in three separate studies.

According to http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0360544204004888, fossil fuel CO2 emissions during the 1990s was 23.5 petagrams of CO2 per year. Ethanol consumption per capita in 2005 for the United States was 2.2 gallons (http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/Resource/GraphicsGallery/Epidemiology/consfigs1.htm), or 6.6 kg per person. Assuming that's roughly representative of the world as a whole (a generous estimate), the world drinks 44 teragrams of ethanol per year. Roughly, human ethanol consumption emits 0.2% of the CO2 that fossil fuel consumption does.

The mass of CO2 used to pressurize kegs is certainly trivial, since it occupies roughly the same volume as the ethanol with much lower density. Also, the CO2 used to pressurize them was produced as the byproduct of other industrial processes, so it shouldn't be counted twice.

Besides which, all of the carbon in ethanol came from the atmosphere anyway, so the net change is 0.