And what the nation should be doing in this crisis.
With all this focus on COVID testing, I wish some expert would point out that the cat’s out of the bag. The virus is already rampant in America. Our current incompetent federal government blew it by delaying and only incompletely halting travel months too late. Trump defunded and dismantled our pandemic defense team. The CDC then failed to make sufficient testing available when it might have helped. That ship has sailed.
Best now to turn attention to fast tracking medications and approving medications showing promise for treatment. The long delays on test results which, right now, will not alter treatment (none is still none), have created huge “log jams” in hospitals. Patients cannot be discharged without results and labs are swamped with defective kits and insufficient test solutions — just creating longer delays, kind of like the lines at supermarkets.
Drastic shortages of protective gear are being more rapidly depleted caring for “suspect patients” who remain in isolation, filling beds for weeks instead of days.
What we need is MORE adequate protective gear so tests can be done without spewing virus all over the place and particularly in the faces of health care personnel doing the swabs. What we need are more ventilators.
At this point, until this national disgrace is rectified, tests should be limited and done only on the very ill already hospitalized who might benefit from fast tracked gamma globulin from survivors, and other drugs which have shown promise.
Furthermore we need to concentrate on screening asymptomatic health care workers on the front lines because we are at highest risk caring for patients with inadequate protection. We probably are infecting each other.
Trump fucked up, is responsible for this inexcusable and shocking lack of response in America despite displacing his role with 2000 more lies.
If the healthcare support teams are all sick or dead, all the test kits in the world will not help anyone. Once millions of functional kits are available and results can be resulted in 24 hours then yes, everyone should be tested for more public health information. Hopefully our next leaders will actually be able to learn from the grave errors of the incompetent ones now in office. For now everyone needs to pretend they might be infected as many are and do not know it.