Tests don't cure disease. For a doctor treating a patient, results of a Corona virus test are useful, and can guide his treatment. Numbers I saw yesterday showed we have nearly one million Corona virus cases and we have conducted five million Corona virus tests. Sounds to me like we have tested all, and more than all, the patients that doctors are treating.
But on TV I see various talking heads, the network kind and the medical kind and the political kind, calling for more and more testing and claiming that we cannot let people get back to work until we have tested more and more people.
Why? If we are testing all the patients, what good does testing everyone in the country do? Especially when the test is suspicious. Testing comes back positive on a lot of people who are in good health and show no symptoms. The medics all say these individuals are "asymptomatic" which is true but doesn't tell us much. We more practical people might say the test shows a lot of false positives. With such a test, more testing will make the Corona virus epidemic look worse. The political and network talking heads are fine with that, they think news of worse Corona virus infection hurts Trump, and they are all dyed in the wool anti-Trumpers.
Me, I think we need to get the country back to work before we run out of stuff, like food, fuel, clothing, personal protective equipment, prescription drugs, toilet paper and a zillion other things. You can see the shortages in every grocery store, lots of empty shelves.
No comments:
Post a Comment