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And Europe's policy needs to change. Nobody is saying dealing with this epidemic is going to be free. Yet the doctor is one of many who are dismissing the like

• gus_massa 7y ago
  There are false positives and false negatives. Now the infected population is very small, so if too many non infected people is testes, the false positives would be much bigger than the true positives. So you would get a lot of people unnecessary in the hospital while they have a normal cold or flu. Anyway, if the symptoms of a normal cold or flu are so bad that deserve hospitalization, the doctor will send you to the hospital even if it is not covid19. [If you are in a risk group, get the flu vaccine. It will not protect you from covid19, but you definitively don't want to catch a bad flu while the hospital if full of covid19 patients.]
• kryogen1c 7y ago
  > dismissing the likelihood of somebody having coronavirus just because they haven't been to Italy. So yes, stupid. The amount of infected people calling in who havent traveled is _infinitecimal_. The doctor saying you're not infected is correct an OVERWHELMING amount of the time, probably >99% accuracy. Eventually, this wont be true, but then the doctor wont be telling everyone to go away because theyre not stupid. Now, if you want to argue the merits of extreme overcaution and attempting things like 100% testing for a global pandemic mitigation plan, good for you. You have a lot of hurdles to overcome, some of which you named yourself, but none of them are the doctors fault. You are simply wrong.