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Tomer Altman
Personal blog · tomeraltman.netsciencedata
Tomer Altman writes Biome Informatics, a personal blog at tomeraltman.net about science and data. Since 2020, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 3 times, most often “Technical Problems with CDC Covid-19 Primers, and an Improved Set of Primers”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked posts cover COVID-19 testing and data: assay specificity for SARS-CoV-2 detection in a Barcelona sewage sample, and technical problems with Italian civil defense testing. Commenters cite them as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog for me to capture my thoughts and showcase my projects, mostly of a technical nature. Topics will be in the orbit of bioinformatics, computational biology, data science, and information security.
Most-linked posts?
- Technical Problems with CDC Covid-19 Primers, and an Improved Set of Primers3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-03-06
What Hacker News says?
They used five assays. All of these were from the WHO in-house assays list. In theory, their primers shouldn't have specificity issues. In practice, it's more complicated than that. The CDC 2019-nCoV rRT-PCR assays have a particularly sketchy history. The WHO in-house assays compendium[4] explicitly states that no false positives are expected for these. But there are huge, annoying caveats to this. (Tedium warning)…
Comment linking /2020/03/03/technical-problems-COVID-primers.html
on “SARS-CoV-2 detected in Barcelona sewage water sample from March 2019”Submitted Technical Problems with CDC Covid-19 Primers, and an Improved Set of Primers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionApart from the bureaucracy there were apparently also some rather embarrassingly elementary technical reasons that the tests didn't work: https://tomeraltman.net/2020/03/03/technical-problems-COVID-...
Comment linking /2020/03/03/technical-problems-COVID-primers.html
on “Data Submitted by the Italian Civil Defense on COVID19 in Italy, Updated Daily”