…is coming to your doctor’s office, or even your home.
We have suffered the most from lack of knowledge of who has it, or has had it. We won’t be able to get back to anything resembling pre-virus normal until we can do extensive testing.
[Update]
This would help a lot, too: Searching for a cure from the blood of survivors.
Where is Theranos when you need them?
None of the tests mentioned is for antibodies. That’s the only test that will tell us anything about the important aspects of this virus: how contagious it actually is, the true incidence of the varying degrees of symptoms, and most importantly, how lethal it is. Epidemiological models are worthless without this data, as are the appropriateness of the precautions we are taking. We are destroying our economy without knowing if it’s necessary.
Also, I’m frankly sick to death of the sniping at President Trump (his “heel dragging”, for example). His briefing yesterday was magnificent, and the media’s response to it was uniformly sick and corrupt.
The science isn’t settled, and won’t be with the testing proposed in this article. Here’s just one site that shows how many questions are being raised by doctors outside of the public “service” arena: https://swprs.org/a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19/
Trump was out in front of the media and the Democrats, who both attacked him for his successful policies. Trump was the one that got the “experts” at the CDC and FDA to get out of the way and he was the one who ordered* industry to work with federal and state governments to rapidly produce and process an immense amount of tests. Not just one test either, but a variety of them and the same goes for treatments and producers of ventilators and PPE.
People complaining don’t comprehend what it actually takes to produce anything much less anything at the scale that things are being developed and deployed. I’d really like to see these people do some basic research into what it takes to create a product and bring it to market.
Who made that happen? Considering how wrong the media has been, perhaps they should give Trump credit when he deserves it rather than continuing carefully crafting deceits to hide the truth and mischaracterize reality.
* Trump didn’t have to order anyone. He used persuasion to get companies on board. He also set aside political differences with Democrat governors, who said the most vile things about him and hate him with the fires of a billion suns, to effectively facilitate the distribution of scare resources that would allow them to handle worst case scenarios, that thankfully never materialized.
From the MIT Tech Review link:
Vaccines can give protection, but no one can predict when one will be available. (At a minimum it will take 12 to 18 months; 17 years since the world battled an earlier coronavirus, SARS, no licensed vaccine exists.)
17 years isn’t just a dropped ball. Somebody took it home and shoved a knife through it. Even if it weren’t effective against CoV2 does anyone seriously think having a CoV1 vaccine in hand would have not helped shorten the timeline to a new vaccine? It’s not WHO it’s WTF.
One of the problems is that SARS just sorta went away, and with no pressure to have a vaccine, there was no glory or money in producing one.
Isn’t that supposed to be one of those functions of gov’t and these supra-national organizations– to act when no one else is, and plan farther ahead? Just another example of how our Comfy Class stays comfy without producing much of any use.