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I am as much disheartened by the continued happy talk we hear even now. Happy talk does not help anything and its dangerous. Now the happy talk is how quickly we can bring the country's economy back up. We still cannot do enough testing and as such we do not know where the virus is going. We were supposed to have 1 million test kits two weeks ago. We had 330,000 a few days ago. We likely are up to about 600,000 today. That is still shy of 1 million and the 1 million were going to be late even if they made the date promised. We still likely need the number of tests suggested by the Scientists weeks ago, 5 million.
What swabs are being done are returning a result 4-5 days later. Some of those swabbed are remaining in hospital beds waiting for the test results to return which is contributing to the burn rate on PPE. So we are still not swabbing enough and not in enough places and the test results still take too long to come back and the burn rate on PPE is causing Medical staff to take risks and become infected. As I have said before once we let the virus go past us we have been chasing it, the most costly possible way to fight it in both health terms and economic terms.
Dr Birx and Fauci are trying to tread a fine line and they have both started to veer off the path they were on initially. Birx today was discussing antibody testing in an effort to explore the underlying rate of contagion that might be hidden by people simply having mild enough symptoms or that were asymptomatic such that they never pursued medical intervention. The death rate compared to the transmission or contagion rate might suggest that many many Americans got the virus and simply went through it without ever seeking or needing medical treatment. Makes some sense. This is one aspect of not testing early enough or broadly enough at high throughput. If a citizen got the virus and now has antibodies to it, maybe they can safely go back to work. Well that is fine. But we don't even have that antibody test yet.
Birx correctly commented that they do not want to go through an antibody test and wait for a result process. You are not going to convince people to come in to test to see if they had something they ignored unless its an instant test with results on the spot. Plus, they have to take blood for an antibody test, not everybody's cup of tea. So a pin prick is way preferred to a needle.
Birx would not commit to a date when the antibody test they want will be available which leads one to suggest the date ain't EASTER SUNDAY or sooner. I have no idea how many antibody tests will be required, probably more than the 5 million COVID-19 tests. Then there is the added complication of figuring out how much immunity the antibodies a person has is earning him.
So we still can't actually test for the virus itself broadly enough. We can't conduct the antibody test as yet and we certainly are not going to put soldiers on county borders to prevent people from traveling between counties. I think Birx is kidding herself commenting that "hopefully" when the time comes, people will not travel between counties. IS SHE KIDDING!!!!!! So Birx and Fauci are also now engaging in a little happy talk of their own though not nearly as dangerous or unrealistic as Trump's happy talk.
We just passed China and Italy for total cases today (82,000+) though our mortality rate is to this point much lower. However you can literally see our Healthcare Delivery System straining and that is in fact what eventually drives up the mortality rate higher than it should be. This patchwork of social distancing methods state to state and county to county is not helping us. Trump appears to want to make it worse.
What swabs are being done are returning a result 4-5 days later. Some of those swabbed are remaining in hospital beds waiting for the test results to return which is contributing to the burn rate on PPE. So we are still not swabbing enough and not in enough places and the test results still take too long to come back and the burn rate on PPE is causing Medical staff to take risks and become infected. As I have said before once we let the virus go past us we have been chasing it, the most costly possible way to fight it in both health terms and economic terms.
Dr Birx and Fauci are trying to tread a fine line and they have both started to veer off the path they were on initially. Birx today was discussing antibody testing in an effort to explore the underlying rate of contagion that might be hidden by people simply having mild enough symptoms or that were asymptomatic such that they never pursued medical intervention. The death rate compared to the transmission or contagion rate might suggest that many many Americans got the virus and simply went through it without ever seeking or needing medical treatment. Makes some sense. This is one aspect of not testing early enough or broadly enough at high throughput. If a citizen got the virus and now has antibodies to it, maybe they can safely go back to work. Well that is fine. But we don't even have that antibody test yet.
Birx correctly commented that they do not want to go through an antibody test and wait for a result process. You are not going to convince people to come in to test to see if they had something they ignored unless its an instant test with results on the spot. Plus, they have to take blood for an antibody test, not everybody's cup of tea. So a pin prick is way preferred to a needle.
Birx would not commit to a date when the antibody test they want will be available which leads one to suggest the date ain't EASTER SUNDAY or sooner. I have no idea how many antibody tests will be required, probably more than the 5 million COVID-19 tests. Then there is the added complication of figuring out how much immunity the antibodies a person has is earning him.
So we still can't actually test for the virus itself broadly enough. We can't conduct the antibody test as yet and we certainly are not going to put soldiers on county borders to prevent people from traveling between counties. I think Birx is kidding herself commenting that "hopefully" when the time comes, people will not travel between counties. IS SHE KIDDING!!!!!! So Birx and Fauci are also now engaging in a little happy talk of their own though not nearly as dangerous or unrealistic as Trump's happy talk.
We just passed China and Italy for total cases today (82,000+) though our mortality rate is to this point much lower. However you can literally see our Healthcare Delivery System straining and that is in fact what eventually drives up the mortality rate higher than it should be. This patchwork of social distancing methods state to state and county to county is not helping us. Trump appears to want to make it worse.
Last edited:
eace
