George Rebane
This may be the most definitive evidence that dumbth is the established order of the day in America. Everyone has been screaming about testing, and continues that to this minute. But no one has told us why test – what kind of metric is testing supposed to provide to public policy makers, and how will it be used to support those policies. I would think that this would be something that we would be briefed on instead of hearing from one side that there are not enough tests, and the other citing the numbers of tests that have been administered and shipped.
The dumbest thing I hear from the daily briefings is that we have now given over 3 million infection tests – really!!? BFD! What the hell are you going to do with the results of 3 million infection tests, results obtained willy-nilly from all over the country over the last 5-6 weeks? I don’t hear the Drs Fauci or Birx telling us jack about how the test results will be used. And what should be even more amazing – but is not – is that our crack journalists, double dummies all, have never thought to even consider asking for the purpose of testing.
Some silly shit answer like, ‘well, it’ll tell the healthcare people if the tested person has C19’ – so what?! If the sumbich already feels poorly with C19 symptoms, it isn’t the test that’s going to get him admitted into a clinic or hospital. And if he isn’t symptomatic, then it’s pure happenstance that a serendipitous test of unknown reliability tests positive, and he’s then advised to get off the streets, and wait until his symptoms appear before he bothers anyone.
And then some other worthy will explain to the peanut gallery that we need testing to find out the extent of the pandemic and identify new C19 hot spots early. Does anyone at NIH or CDC have a clue about the kind of testing program required – its extent, frequency, and duration – for that?? We hope that someone there passed a stats class somewhere in their career, but today they sure as hell don’t act like it.
Infection testing needs to be conducted continuously on random samples drawn from critical target populations – remember, infection tests are snapshots the results of which can and do change overnight. To be fair, Dr Fauci last night finally acknowledged that neither the US nor any other country has the ability to do the kind of infection testing for early identification of hot spots. And don’t get me started again on factoring in test reliabilities into any kind of a non-existent organized testing program; no one has even made a peep about that.
Immunity (antibody/antigen) testing gives time-dependent enduring results that tells us the extent of herd immunity that may already exist in a target population. However, Dr Birx also finally admitted that today’s immunity test reliabilities are so bad that it’s futile to use them with any confidence to determine the recovered share of target populations. When and if such tests become reliable, at that point if the recovered share is sufficiently high, then even ‘lives over profits’ policy makers can start staging back-to-work policies. And if the recovered population grows too slowly, then that advises that the target population is hunkering down too hard, and we again need to loosen things up a mite to start making progress against C19.
But in the meantime, what in hell is going on out there with our political leaders and their teams of so-called ‘experts’?? Given what we can and cannot do in the testing field, the known attributes of C19, and the general dynamics of virulent epidemics, it’s past time to start a programmed loosening up of America’s commerce.
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