With mass testing, we could spare people massive anxiety they have due to unclear symptoms.
Testing people who haven’t been in contact with a confirmed case and who are not showing symptoms is bullshit right now. Even testing people who have been in contact and who are not displaying symptoms right now is ill advised because not enough reagents for testing are available worldwide.
So, not gonna happen with PCR tests, which is what is out there. Until proper and reliable antibody tests are on the market, we cannot really “mass test” as in millions of people.
Germany right now has a technical capacity of around 500k tests a week. The practical capacity is lower. Labs are ordering supplies for their PCR, and they don’t get the amounts needed. Tests are very likely already rationalised on different levels of organisation (keep in mind that testing is highly federalised in Germany, with communal Gesundheitsämter being responsible, Länder health ministries co-ordinating and giving out policies, the (partly federally funded) RKI and the federal Ministry of Health doing overarching coordination and giving out policies on the federal level. And regional or local lab groups are doing the actual testing.
There is no way we can test 82 million people in Germany with PCRs, and also no point since you only catch active cases with that. Which, of course, is important for medical interventions for the individual, but not really to find out what to do with policies and politics of the pandemic on the longer timescale.
We will see a shift in testing towards antibody tests. And I sincerely hope that the stuff posted above about US government shifting away from mass (PCR) testing is already an indicator of this. Seriously, it is not entirely impossible that this is the right thing to do.
I’m going to posit, before reading this, that it will be similar to the “ventilators” Musk contributed (modified cpap machines) and be adequate at best for mild treatment, and in no way replace the ventilators needed for severe cases.
I’m actually a bit worried all of the feel good DIY ventilator stories are going to diminish the perception of the actual problem.
yeah. it’s very chicken and egg. the structures that enabled gates to make the money he did ( monopoly, poor taxation, corporate welfare, poor government oversight ) are the same ones that broke our healthcare, forced people to live paycheck to paycheck, and enabled someone so manifestly incompetent as trump to become president.
and because of those things, we’re required to hope that at least a few of the “winners” do the right thing.
but it’s a mixed bag.
bezos has been dragged kicking and screaming to doing even some right things by his workers. elon musk has been doing solely per-forma public relations. his brother hasn’t even bothered with that. other wealthy people like bloomberg, the walton family, or those who own private equity investments in hospital are actively working against their workers.
we’ve got what we’ve got. we didn’t get to be #1 by accident.
There can be no such thing as “safe” until an effective vaccine is developed. We have no idea about duration or durability of post-infectious immunity. There are far too many unknowns to this beast. We need to assume everyone is infected until we have confidence in some form of immunity. Right now we just do not know.
“ The Cargill plant in Hazleton, one of the largest meat-processing plants east of the Mississippi, closed with four other such plants due to the Coronavirus.”
Given McSally’s record on budget balancing—she, like most Republicans, complains mightily about deficit spending while voting for budgets that drive it higher and higher—and her consistent lying about her record on health care (yes, Martha, you have repeatedly voted to strip away regulations to a prevent insurance company from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions), it’s hardly a surprise that she considers Kudlow a reliable source. She may not like liberal hacks, but she has no problem with conservative ones.
