And Texas Caves In
The last bastion of sanity has jumped on the "stay at home" bandwagon. They just sent me an email that they have closed all state parks to save the 1% who may die from the dreaded super virus. Texas...
Forum Discussion
A common theme is we need more and more and more testing. Could someone please explain exactly what that will accomplish? A test doesn't cure anyone. The only time I see an advantage, other than to the statisticians, is if you test positive for the active virus and you have no other symptoms. Then you could quarantine yourself until you are no longer a silent carrier. But what are the odds of identifying that silent carrier? Currently only one out of over 500 people in the US have been diagnosed with COVID. That would mean you have to go through a lot of haystacks to find the needles.
Testing negative would mean almost nothing. It wouldn't prevent you from future infections. It wouldn't make you less at risk doing anything involving contact with others since you could become infected at any time. Even the momentary relief a person might feel at knowing they are not sick would quickly be extinguished by the knowledge they are just a vulnerable going forward as they were before they were tested.
If you have an antibody test and test positive, you probably (though the experts say it isn't a guarantee) have some immunity. While that would give you, as an individual, some comfort I don't see where it is even within the realm of possibility that we create some kind of virus passport and those people become a higher class of citizen able to do things the rest of us are not. If that actually came to pass, people would try to become infected, hoping to recover and gain that preferred status.
So unless the goal is create a statistical cover saying the virus is not nearly as dangerous as was thought, testing on a massive scale will not lead us to a much safer environment. It appears to me that calling for widespread testing before action can be taken to open up the economy is a way for the politicians and other decision makers to look and sound like they are doing something and give themselves leverage to delay the inevitable relaxation of restrictions.
Testing negative would mean almost nothing. It wouldn't prevent you from future infections. It wouldn't make you less at risk doing anything involving contact with others since you could become infected at any time. Even the momentary relief a person might feel at knowing they are not sick would quickly be extinguished by the knowledge they are just a vulnerable going forward as they were before they were tested.
If you have an antibody test and test positive, you probably (though the experts say it isn't a guarantee) have some immunity. While that would give you, as an individual, some comfort I don't see where it is even within the realm of possibility that we create some kind of virus passport and those people become a higher class of citizen able to do things the rest of us are not. If that actually came to pass, people would try to become infected, hoping to recover and gain that preferred status.
So unless the goal is create a statistical cover saying the virus is not nearly as dangerous as was thought, testing on a massive scale will not lead us to a much safer environment. It appears to me that calling for widespread testing before action can be taken to open up the economy is a way for the politicians and other decision makers to look and sound like they are doing something and give themselves leverage to delay the inevitable relaxation of restrictions.
