COVID Testing
When you're trying to contain a disease break-out, testing matters. Once the disease is in the general population -- and contact tracing and controls are impractical, testing is strictly for individual diagnostics (to decide treatment) or for trend tracking in your community. This is especially true if the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) of the disease is closer to that of the flu than ebola. If the Press isn't telling you that, it's FakeNews. And if an economist is telling you we need to test everyone before we go back to work, they're idiots or frauds. Based on COVID Studies we can guesstimate that 10-20M Americans have been exposed to COVID, and that number is far higher globally. The idea that you can test all of us weekly, and contract trace everyone who shows positive is delusional. Police states don't have the resources to do this, and they aren't limited by our Constitution or armed population with a passion for civil liberties (including privacy).
Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience
In a dim-witted post, a "Blue Ribbon" panel of far left "thought leaders" thinks that we need 20M tests before we should open the economy. It fails to mention that they won that ribbon from the AKC (as Chinese Crested Hairless's), and that number was the product of their de-worming pill.
A quick search (and applying basic logic) is that:
- we have ≈400 metros in the U.S. (and that's pretty generous on what's a metro) -- if you figure 100 tests per day each, thats 40,000 tests/day.
- if we do Hospital level tracking (5,724), >10 localities per metro at a twice-weekly interval (overkill for places like Carson City or Walla Walla), and you'll need 163,542 tests/day
Either is more than enough for trend tracking to know if your part of a city is heating up or cooling down, and if your mitigation efforts are working, and what resources or policy changes you need. Which is all this kind of test is for. 50 - 500x as many tests doesn't really help much (as we can't respond or de-noise faster than that), it just wastes a lot of resources.
Remember the basics:
- We have too many active cases to trace contacts... anyone suggesting we create a surveillance state, would also be requiring we create a police state to enforce it. And they're Marxist morons, we can ignore.
- The lagging nature of symptoms/tests means you should still treat everyone as a potential threat whether they have had a test, or are asymptomatic or not. So there should be no "go back to work" papers as the morons claim. Too many false positives or negatives, and we don't know if you can re-catch or become a carrier even if you're "immunized".
- And we can't wait months until we have "herd immunity" to go back to work. Sorry, you just have to accept that people are going to get sick, and/or allow more remote workers for a while.
- Spot testing first responders, isn't a bad thing -- but if they're asymptomatic and following protocols they shouldn't give it to patients. And if they following protocols they shouldn't get it from patients. So the value of these tests aren't nearly as important as the policies and enforcement of protocols.
- Spot testing admissions? Meh. During an outbreak all staff and patients should be treated as contagious -- so it helps with diagnostics, but not in preventing contagion.
Conclusion
So the 20M number for tests? Completely fabricated and unnecessary. Either they're idiots that don't know economics or medicine, or they do and have an agenda. What they're really saying is that they haven't held the economy under water long enough, because they're still seeing bubbles. Let's move the goalpost until the bubbles stop.
It's up to you guess why they would want to do that. Some reasons might be:
- When I'm being generous I'd guess they want a new dependency class of unemployed, layabouts, welfare queens and other Democrats.
- Either that or they want to set a brain dead milestone (that no one can meet), then accuse the administration of failing because they can't meet it
- The more cynical take is that they want to destroy the country and remake it in their Socialist (USSA) image, and they are willing to sacrifice as many lives and jobs as it takes to get there
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