I know it's not helpful in the now (because it's a Project to get people together for it) and you're venting, so feel free not to read this, but on the topic of decentralized mutual aid:
running the tests is much simpler and cheaper than creating them.
their lab notebooks are online, as are their onboarding material and procedure documents, reagent lists and sources. they didn't have the 99$-500$ low volume open hardware thermocyclers we have available now, and you can make a two-vial Whirligig Centrifuge for like 4$ if a spinny boi is even needed (I've only skimmed).
someone would have to email them and some biologists to make sure it'll still pick up current strains, or learn how to modify it, but it's looking at more RNA than those mutations so might not even require tweaking.
it's just a time cost for the people involved.
it doesn't help you right now, because you can't build it in 14 days. but 10 people probably could in a week. They just need to be physically proximate and willing to donate time until the kinks in the process are worked out for the specific equipment.
I'm not sure how good of a use of time it is for a mutual aid thing because of how little people are pcr testing anymore as a population, but if people already have community networks it slots into them pretty easily. but everyone i know just forgot these existed, including myself until your post.
how to get people to form the groups required though, is the hard part. But we do have the tools, or at least ~trivial access to them with pooled money on a per-district basis. it's not perfectly decentralized, some of the reagents need to be bought from suppliers, but it's close.
(running our own bioreactors for the reagents is possible but requires much more capital outlay. DIYbio was a strong movement until about 2016 and then sorta faded from memory, but it still exists)
I can't dedicate time to this project for months if at all, but the procedure is much less involved than I thought for low test volume, and for higher test volume you can have more people running it in parallel on parallel hardware. I (and probably many others) forgot this existed until you brought it up. it feels like twenty years ago.
whether that's 130$ worth of time to the people involved is a separate question. but a lot of people within our various communities have time to give, who aren't given many other opportunities to use it (disabled people without enough stability or predictability of symptoms so they can't work jobs but can and want to do work (hi), etc)
