What is up with this obsession with testing? We need to lower R0 and scale up medical infrastructure. Elimination at this point is a fantasy.
To be clear, testing is important. But to suggest that it should be the priority over isolation and distancing seems misguided.
[1]: https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1240740763752902670
No at-home test exists yet, and we surely aren't producing 300 million tests daily yet, but this should be the target.
Tests are good. We need containment now if we want them to be useful.
Partially because of the idea that South Korea tested its way to safety. While its true that heavy testing was a key part of their containment plan, it also relied on a lot of investigative work, etc. It's also too late in the US since we already had uncontrolled and undetected community spread.
Partially because the US government screwed up the testing capacity. So people are overly valuing testing because its an easy way to assign blame. People love an oversimplified cause to a disaster because it makes life seem less random.
Antibodies are what we need to be testing for. 10 minutes from blood to result. Works on formerly infected and currently infected.
You need tests to backtrack and force isolate the sick. This waiting it out shit won’t cut it
> You need tests to backtrack and force isolate the sick. This waiting it out shit won’t cut it
You can only test and isolate if you first institute quarantine measures. Even after instituting quarantine measures, we still will unlikely be able to prevent an eventual resurgence of the disease.
From everything I've read, there's no path out of this that doesn't involve either:
a. shelter & scaling up critical care
b. at least a million people in the US dead
Ofc you lock down then test everyone who comes in the hospital and then everyone who they came in contact with recursively until you stop finding any positives. Then you lock em all up for three weeks
Edit: and i dont mean self quarantine. I mean like the chinese did it
I agree that it is a pipe dream to suggest that we could scale up critical beds such that hospitals will not be overburdened. But I disagree that there is nothing to be done.
If we've bought time so that rather than 5 critical cases/bed we have 3, that is a huge improvement and still means potentially hundreds of thousands saved.
I am also skeptical that the primary or only shortage is labor.