The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, was first discovered in late 2019 in Wuhan, China. There is no vaccine, humans have no pre-existing immunities like we do to the Flu, and it weakens us in a way that may kill us on its own, or it might expose us to opportunistic infections. It is fairly infectious, including for a week or more before we show any signs of being ill. Around half of people recover before they show any symptoms, yet they were infectious the whole time. There are no known palliative measures, although a few have briefly shown some promise. So far, none have panned out.
The Trump administration chose to abandon all pandemic preparations made during previous administrations. This included demoting or firing most of the people who had any real expertise, such as the Pandemic Response Team, tossing their extensive plans, and installing a toadie as head of the CDC. The first Trump CDC director was pushed out for blatant corruption, the second seems to have engaged largely in preventing the CDC from doing its job properly.
Trump has consistently poo poohed the need for testing, and has consistently lied about it. He has also obstructed the distribution of medical ventilators, and most alarming of all, has obstructed the distribution of all types of Personal Protective Equipment: masks, gloves, gowns, etc. We're 3 months into this thing and while it's finally possible to get a simple mask, it is still not possible to get an N95 without a special connection. Most of this can be categorized as negligence, but two things: forcing the distribution to be exclusively on the open market, which has led to enormous gouging, and numerous cases of federal agencies swooping in and confiscating PPEs just before they got to their end user, have massively and needlessly exacerbated the problem.
So what should we do? In the absence of anything better, quarantine. The bubonic plague has been pretty much eliminated through quarantine. Smallpox was substantially suppressed with quarantine, although its final elimination didn't come about until we had a vaccine. And so on.
But there's all this asymptomatic contagion. The first step was stay-at-home orders for just about everybody. Unfortunately we need medical attention and groceries, so there has to be some big holes, which allows a lot of spread. Fortunately, we already have several tests, but unfortunately, the knucklehead in charge at the CDC screwed up when it was discovered that there had been a mistake, and Trump has insisted on the vicissitudes of the free market governing availability. This would have been a perfect use for the defense authorization act, but no. He has several times suggested that he doesn't like testing, and the reason always seems to be that he's afraid that knowing the truth will make him look bad. On this I am sure he is correct. How about fixing this problem by not being such a pathological idiot?
The first and most important thing we need to do is to get a lot more testing. As of today (May 17), we are doing about 200,000 tests a day. People who regularly come into contact with the disease, mainly medical people, should be tested every day. There are 1.1 million doctors and 3.8 million nurses in the country. Not all of them are working COVID. Let's estimate that 2 million of them are. In addition, there are around 20 million people who have jobs rated "essential" (e.g. grocery clerk) that come into contact with a lot of people, but only a few of them are likely sick, and with barriers and similar measures, we can reduce their risk, but not eliminate it. We should probably test them once a week. That's another 3 million tests a day for a total of 5 million. This is the bare minimum.
We need to test the people in nursing homes. These are people who are especially vulnerable and they're living in very close contact with each other. There are about 1.5M of them. they, and the people who take care of them, should probably be tested pretty often. Lets say 300,000 tests a day nationwide. The prisons are roughly the same size. There are only about 70,000 people in the meat slaughtering and packing business, but they work in very close contact and there have been several bad outbreaks. They should probably be tested a couple of times a week. There are probably a bunch of other such occupations.
I'm thinking we should probably test everybody at least every other month or so. There are 320M of us, but subtracting the people from other categories, it's a bit under 300M. If we test each of them every 60 days, that's another 5 million tests a day. We're up to a total of 10 million tests. That means we're undertesting by a factor of 50.
No comments:
Post a Comment