Dear Leader is desperate to ‘re-open’ the country (whatever that means), claims our testing is the best (hardly), and says he has the power to do it (not bloody likely).
Every sane person agrees that we don’t have anywhere near enough testing available to make ‘getting back to normal’ more than a pipe dream, but none of the governors or experts I’ve listened to have been able to quantify, or even approximate, what an adequate testing regimen would look like. The consensus seems to be ‘a whole hell of a lot more than we have now.’
Currently, testing in the USA is mostly to determine if people who are sick enough with Covid-19 symptoms to go to the doctor or hospital (or maybe one of the few drive-through testing sites that actually materialized… remember when Trump crowed about every Walmart parking lot having a drive-through testing site?) actually have Covid-19 or just the flu. There doesn’t seem to be enough tests available for surveillance testing, even of first responders and health care workers, much less anyone else.
FYI, I’m watching a video on CNN about the ER at a NYC hospital. The doctor took us out to the tent that is the ER annex for testing, and there was a prominent sign: NO TESTING FOR MILD SYMPTOMS.
Ummmm…. seriously? Go away, we don’t care if you’re infected and shedding virus in all directions! Come back after you infect a bunch of people and get too sick to keep riding the subway.
No, I’m sorry, those healthcare workers DO care, and they really want to test those mildly symptomatic people, but they just don’t have enough tests to do so. Dear Leader is the one who doesn’t care….. but wait, Dear Leader doesn’t want too many people to be tested because he wants to keep his numbers down.
So what does an adequate testing regime look like? Well, I only know of one place that has implemented one: Vo Euganeo, Italy.
Vo is a town of about 3,300 in northern Italy that first encountered Covid-19 in mid-February. The immediately locked down the town, tested EVERYONE, found about 100 infected people, isolated them, waited 2 weeks, tested everyone again, found about 8 infected people, isolated them, kept the lockdown and didn’t find anymore cases after that. Unfortunately, they were unable to repeat this intensive course of action for the entire region of Lombardy (because of lack of enough testing capability) so the virus spread.
So that works. Will anything else?
I think there’s an intersection between a decreasing number of unidentified infected people and an increasing testing capacity…. and I think it is where a whole lot of testing is chasing a very few infected people. It also requires the intensive and invasive contact tracing that was successful in China, but which the USA hasn’t shown an ability to field on a large scale.
It doesn’t seem very likely that this country, under our current ‘leadership’, is ever going to get to that point.
More likely, Dear Leader is going to start pressuring Republican governors to open up for business on May 1. Most will tell him to go pound sand, but I’m sure our governor down here in Florida — who is well-known as a big Trumpie — will fall all over himself to show ‘daddy’ what a good little boy he is, and demand Florida businesses get back to work. He’s already threatened to open the schools soon.
Testing? Who needs testing? It’s not even part of the discussion. After all, Dear Leader says our testing is the best in the world!
Hey, let’s get Disney back open right away! Fly families in from all over the world to stand cheek by jowl in line for rides….. fire up those cruise ships!….. Beaches! Get the beaches open!
Cheers.