Chickenboy
Posts: 24520
Joined: 6/29/2002 From: San Antonio, TX Status: offline
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The benefits of testing have been vastly overstated on this thread and in society writ large. As I have mentioned before, testing should be a decision making tool. Where it cannot be used as a decision making tool, it is inherently devalued in its utility. One does not stop an outbreak with testing. Understanding? Sure. Altering the IFR/CFR for posterity sake? OK. But the rationale for why some countries have fared better than others in this outbreak has no correlation that I can find with how widespread their virus testing regimens have been-it's simply not possible to use this information in real time to affect the epidemic curve with a ubiquitous virus. Deaths / M population. Excluding San Marino and Andorra, Belgium has the dubious honor of leading the pack. They've tested a larger percentage of their population than the United States, yet their mortality rate / M is roughly 4x ours. Luxembourgh has tested ~5x the percentage of their population we have, yet have a similar mortality rate. Switzerland has tested twice what we have, yet their deaths/M is ~50% greater than ours. France has tested a lower percentage of their population than the US, yet their deaths /M is 2.5x what ours is. And so on. Virus (e.g., PCR) testing for a ubiquitous virus will not intervene in the epidemic profile. Contact tracing at this stage is a pipe dream and totally unworkable, so the benefit of the test is subsumed. One can't derive much additional benefit for decision making from most nations' testing programs as they are now. If one assumed that the virus is every nation around the globe and that 'lots' of people have it that may not be showing clinical signs, how does testing 10,000/M or 20,000/M or 30,000/M derive benefit in tamping down the infection? Should we say that we shouldn't 'reopen the economy' until we get to X/M tests? Nope. There's no clear correlation with the number of tests performed with how 'well' countries have fared with this thing. IMO, the greatest correlation with fewest deaths / M population is how local/regional/national edicts on extreme social distancing have been observed. The greatest likelihood that someone will die from this agent is whether they get it in the first place, not whether the country has more (superfluous?) testing than another. I think when the dust settles, for those capable of swallowing some unpleasant truths, there will be an opportunity to reevaluate the public health care systems of some of these countries most wracked by the disease. Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Luxembourg and, yes, the United States should search their souls and see what they did really really wrong. But for now, that's an open political wound.
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< Message edited by Chickenboy -- 4/18/2020 4:33:42 PM >
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