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The tests are not accurate. [1] We are running around like chickens freaking out about tests. The only thing to do at this point is Social Distancing so the gro

The tests are not accurate. [1] We are running around like chickens freaking out about tests. The only thing to do at this point is Social Distancing so the growth curve flattens out. Testing is NOT a solution. Testing will not make a sick person better. We have limited resources. Testing is being advocated by those trying to trace the community spread. I have news for you, if you think you have it you got it! Everyone will get it. Tracking this is a waste of resources at this point as the false positives mean additional limited Frontline Health Care workers treating actually sick individuals. We need to minimize the community spread, that means stay away from events. Work from home. Individuals should self quarantine at any sign of illness. Critical patients should be admitted to hospitals. Everyone else should do everything in their power to slow the spread. You got a cough? Stay home. You feel tired or run down? Stay home. You have a fever and it went away? Stay home for the next 14 days. If your employer will not let you work from home, email them that you believe you are an asymptotic carrier of the COVID-19 virus and if they will not let you take paid sick leave or work from home you will be in the office immediately. Tell all your coworkers you requested to stay home and management wouldn't let you... Let the lawyers sort it out with HR. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32133832 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32133832

BubRoss 7y ago
> I have news for you, if you think you have it you got it This is a ridiculous thing to say after talking about test accuracy. You can't improve what you can't quantify. Also your assumption that so many people have a job they can do from home or over email is ridiculous.
- altcognito 7y ago
  In fact, you won’t know if your test is inaccurate if you don’t test! Over and over again I hear people talk about how it is a waste of resources to test. Tests are not expensive in time or material. They will pay off. No, they don’t help you cure anything. We dont have a cure! Tests help you quarantine and mitigate.
- ajuc 7y ago
  > You can't improve what you can't quantify. That's obviously false.
  - TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
    It may not be 100% true, but quanitfying the accuracy certainly helps.
  - bumby 7y ago
    Sure, you can randomly shotgun a bunch of potential solutions and hope for the best, but any systematic improvement process relies on quantitative measures and root cause analysis.
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    How would you know if it was?
    - ajuc 7y ago
      Random changes can be positive and you don't need to quantify anything to do them. Also quantifying after the fact isn't what we're talking about so I could test and verify that indeed you did improved something 10 years ago and you made that improvement without quantifying anything yourself.
      - BubRoss 7y ago
        How do you know if something is positive without being able to quantify it?
        ajuc 7y ago
        You don't need to know about something for it to be true.
        BubRoss 7y ago
        You don't know if something is true if you can't measure or test it.
mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
5 weeks, not 14 days.
petschge 7y ago
You do need testing to dial in what level of social distancing brings the rate down to a level the health care system can handle without dragging out the crisis needlessly long.
gmm1990 7y ago
--edited because I don't think it matters if there are false positives what matters is the public understands the serious nature of the situation. I have no medical training but below is my observation Your points are valid (not regarding false positive rates), but the population still thinks the numbers put out are valid. So if we could ramp up testing very quickly (which seems to be possible given what the Cleveland Clinic is able to do) it would be beneficial for the public to see how bad the situation is. I haven't been able to convince anyone with symptoms that they are in fact likely to have it. (it could also be useful for hospitals to apply specific treatment regimens, when they get more defined)
- tlb 7y ago
  Gaming the metrics to convince the public of something never ends well.
koheripbal 7y ago
This is an extremist position that isn't useful. Testing is critical for contact tracing which still plays a fundamental role even in mitigation phase. Infinite social distancing isn't practical. Some people still need to work and we need to know who has just a damn cold vs covid-19.
closeparen 7y ago
All the other illnesses in the world are still here, too.
yters 7y ago
Wont extreme social distancing just lead to another outbreak in the near future?
- Balvarez 7y ago
  I think the hope is to lower the infection rate over a longer period of time so hospitals aren't overwhelmed
  - yters 7y ago
    Which hospitals are overwhelmed?
sporkologist 7y ago
Yup gotta keep those numbers down, right? But seriously, the only way to get ahead of this is to test everyone. Didn't you learn anything in epidemiology?
pmoriarty 7y ago
"Testing is NOT a solution. Testing will not make a sick person better. ... Tracking this is a waste of resources" This is just wrong on so many levels. First, on an individual level, if doctors know you're infected with COVID-19, and your illness is severe enough, they might be willing to try an experimental treatment (like chloroquine) that they wouldn't for seasonal influenza or some other illness. You might also be offered to participate in one of the hundreds of research studies that are ongoing in trying to find a treatment for this disease. You would not be a candidate for those studies unless they knew that you did in fact have COVID-19. If doctors know you are infected with COVID-19, they are also more likely to isolate you and wear protective equipment that is essential to keep the disease from spreading to our precious medical personnel and vulnerable hospital populations. Then, on the public health level, we need to understand how this disease is spreading, who is the most vulnerable and who is the least vulnerable and why. We also need to understand who has recovered and why they've done so, and if people have gotten sick again from re-infection, and why. Alternatively, maybe people have had been re-exposed to the disease but not gotten sick. Why is that? We need to effectively plan for future outbreaks, to allocate precious resources to places that are the most affected, to quarantine areas that are hardest hit. None of that can be done unless we have a better grasp on who has the disease and who doesn't. Testing is critically important for all of this and more. To advocate for the abandonment of testing simply because it's not perfect is madness. It's better to drive with one eye open than both eyes closed.
jahlove 7y ago
> if you think you have it you got it! Most people who think they have it actually have a cold or flu.
- thinkingemote 7y ago
  And if they stay at home then that means less vulnerable people will get those diseases, making it easier to cope later.
tlb 7y ago
Extensive testing is very useful at the beginning. It becomes less useful as the pandemic progresses. A danger is that so much outrage has built up over the US’s failure to test that lobbying for testing will result in too many resources devoted to testing long after it’s still useful.
lubesGordi 7y ago
This is what Illinois seems to be doing anyway. It makes sense to me. We don't have enough tests or medical staff to test everyone. Easier to just make everyone stay home. "If you are sick and have respiratory symptoms, such as fever, cough, and shortness of breath, stay home unless you need medical attention" http://dph.illinois.gov/topics-services/diseases-and-conditions/diseases-a-z-list/coronavirus http://dph.illinois.gov/topics-services/diseases-and-conditi...
grawprog 7y ago
>I have news for you, if you think you have it you got it! Everyone will get it. Tracking this is a waste of resources at this point as the false positives mean additional limited Frontline Health Care workers treating actually sick individuals. I'm glad to see someone say this. The over reaction is causing more problems than the actual virus. With every other recent potential pandemic, there was a reasonable response, the severity of the diseases were responded to accordingly, panic was at a minimum, especially considering more recent scares have been with viruses that cause far more serious diseases than this latest one. This time, there's been an extreme focus on infection rates and zero focus on actual symptoms, which from every account i've seen so far, do not seem to be very terrifying for 99% of the population, yet the reaction has been just over the top everywhere. This is going to spread around the world, we'll either get it or we won't, it's not going anywhere, it's out in the world, as soon as the first person got sick and spread it, it was inevitable. There's so much effort globally going into trying to stop or hide from this and I still don't really understand why. When I was a kid, it was a regular thing to expose kids to chickenpox because it was just better to get it and get it over with, chickenpox sucked a whole lot. A whole lot more than having covid-19 would be from what I can tell. It's the symptoms of a disease that scare me, not whether i'll get it. Personally, I was a lot more worried about the recent flu virus from a few years back that was killing young healthy people, than this disease that's not much more than a bad cold unless you're knocking on death's door already or in your 80's. If people that get it, don't even realize they have it and nothing bad is really happening to them, then why should I be losing my shit and freaking out? Why should I be scared of getting a disease that's about the same as something I get nearly every year anyway?
- dboreham 7y ago
  I think you're slightly off track as to the frustration with lack of testing: Let's start with widespread complacency opposed to requests to take distancing measures: people (not me, but .. read FB comments from regular people on news stories) are mad at sports events being canceled because "nobody has the virus". So we don't get the social distancing response needed. If on the other hand we had some testing data from the general population, or even from just mildly sick people, then the requests for social distancing could be presented with "and we know this thing is here now, so these measures are going to have a significant effect".
avip 7y ago
Ignoring the controversial parts of your comment - voluntary distancing to the point of "work disobedience" is of extreme importance, and we developers should responsibly lead the charge and flat out stay home regardless any policy or management opinion. We have it easy we can trivially work from home and no one will fire us during this crisis. So don't wait just do it.
- macintux 7y ago
  > no one will fire us during this crisis There are many businesses out there that are going to be suffering heavily from the total collapse of tourism, downtown office work, community events, etc; I wouldn’t assume any job is sacrosanct given that level of belt tightening. In agree with the rest of your message, however.
Leary 7y ago
This is wrong on so many levels. Just because the tests are not 100% accurate does not mean they are useless. "if you think you have it you got it" This is patently false. Given potential asymptomatic spread, widespread testing is the only way to limit the virus like what South Korea did
molodec 7y ago
Work from home. This is great advice for people who work by typing commands on a computer. Seems like people who are in tech think that coding, chatting on slack, etc. is what work is all about. There are so many jobs out there that we depend on require that people physically come to work.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  I wonder what percent of jobs are reasonably safe to do (e.g. no forced close proximity to others). Office jobs are particularly bad and often easy to do from home, and many warehouse jobs don't have as close of proximity to other workers (many machines are operated by individuals), while jobs like trucking require almost none.
mindslight 7y ago
> Testing is NOT a solution This might be right, iff testing were some kind of binary choice that needed to be made one way or the other. But why should the tool of testing be politicized and debated, rather than it simply being one resource available to doctors to use as they see fit?

BubRoss 7y ago

> I have news for you, if you think you have it you got it This is a ridiculous thing to say after talking about test accuracy. You can't improve what you can't quantify. Also your assumption that so many people have a job they can do from home or over email is ridiculous.

altcognito 7y ago
In fact, you won’t know if your test is inaccurate if you don’t test! Over and over again I hear people talk about how it is a waste of resources to test. Tests are not expensive in time or material. They will pay off. No, they don’t help you cure anything. We dont have a cure! Tests help you quarantine and mitigate.
ajuc 7y ago
> You can't improve what you can't quantify. That's obviously false.
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
  It may not be 100% true, but quanitfying the accuracy certainly helps.
- bumby 7y ago
  Sure, you can randomly shotgun a bunch of potential solutions and hope for the best, but any systematic improvement process relies on quantitative measures and root cause analysis.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  How would you know if it was?
  - ajuc 7y ago
    Random changes can be positive and you don't need to quantify anything to do them. Also quantifying after the fact isn't what we're talking about so I could test and verify that indeed you did improved something 10 years ago and you made that improvement without quantifying anything yourself.
    - BubRoss 7y ago
      How do you know if something is positive without being able to quantify it?
      - ajuc 7y ago
        You don't need to know about something for it to be true.
        BubRoss 7y ago
        You don't know if something is true if you can't measure or test it.

mrhappyunhappy 7y ago

5 weeks, not 14 days.

petschge 7y ago

You do need testing to dial in what level of social distancing brings the rate down to a level the health care system can handle without dragging out the crisis needlessly long.

gmm1990 7y ago

--edited because I don't think it matters if there are false positives what matters is the public understands the serious nature of the situation. I have no medical training but below is my observation Your points are valid (not regarding false positive rates), but the population still thinks the numbers put out are valid. So if we could ramp up testing very quickly (which seems to be possible given what the Cleveland Clinic is able to do) it would be beneficial for the public to see how bad the situation is. I haven't been able to convince anyone with symptoms that they are in fact likely to have it. (it could also be useful for hospitals to apply specific treatment regimens, when they get more defined)

tlb 7y ago
Gaming the metrics to convince the public of something never ends well.

koheripbal 7y ago

This is an extremist position that isn't useful. Testing is critical for contact tracing which still plays a fundamental role even in mitigation phase. Infinite social distancing isn't practical. Some people still need to work and we need to know who has just a damn cold vs covid-19.

closeparen 7y ago

All the other illnesses in the world are still here, too.

yters 7y ago

Wont extreme social distancing just lead to another outbreak in the near future?

Balvarez 7y ago
I think the hope is to lower the infection rate over a longer period of time so hospitals aren't overwhelmed
- yters 7y ago
  Which hospitals are overwhelmed?

sporkologist 7y ago

Yup gotta keep those numbers down, right? But seriously, the only way to get ahead of this is to test everyone. Didn't you learn anything in epidemiology?

pmoriarty 7y ago

"Testing is NOT a solution. Testing will not make a sick person better. ... Tracking this is a waste of resources" This is just wrong on so many levels. First, on an individual level, if doctors know you're infected with COVID-19, and your illness is severe enough, they might be willing to try an experimental treatment (like chloroquine) that they wouldn't for seasonal influenza or some other illness. You might also be offered to participate in one of the hundreds of research studies that are ongoing in trying to find a treatment for this disease. You would not be a candidate for those studies unless they knew that you did in fact have COVID-19. If doctors know you are infected with COVID-19, they are also more likely to isolate you and wear protective equipment that is essential to keep the disease from spreading to our precious medical personnel and vulnerable hospital populations. Then, on the public health level, we need to understand how this disease is spreading, who is the most vulnerable and who is the least vulnerable and why. We also need to understand who has recovered and why they've done so, and if people have gotten sick again from re-infection, and why. Alternatively, maybe people have had been re-exposed to the disease but not gotten sick. Why is that? We need to effectively plan for future outbreaks, to allocate precious resources to places that are the most affected, to quarantine areas that are hardest hit. None of that can be done unless we have a better grasp on who has the disease and who doesn't. Testing is critically important for all of this and more. To advocate for the abandonment of testing simply because it's not perfect is madness. It's better to drive with one eye open than both eyes closed.

jahlove 7y ago

> if you think you have it you got it! Most people who think they have it actually have a cold or flu.

thinkingemote 7y ago
And if they stay at home then that means less vulnerable people will get those diseases, making it easier to cope later.

tlb 7y ago

Extensive testing is very useful at the beginning. It becomes less useful as the pandemic progresses. A danger is that so much outrage has built up over the US’s failure to test that lobbying for testing will result in too many resources devoted to testing long after it’s still useful.

lubesGordi 7y ago

This is what Illinois seems to be doing anyway. It makes sense to me. We don't have enough tests or medical staff to test everyone. Easier to just make everyone stay home. "If you are sick and have respiratory symptoms, such as fever, cough, and shortness of breath, stay home unless you need medical attention" http://dph.illinois.gov/topics-services/diseases-and-conditions/diseases-a-z-list/coronavirus http://dph.illinois.gov/topics-services/diseases-and-conditi...

grawprog 7y ago

>I have news for you, if you think you have it you got it! Everyone will get it. Tracking this is a waste of resources at this point as the false positives mean additional limited Frontline Health Care workers treating actually sick individuals. I'm glad to see someone say this. The over reaction is causing more problems than the actual virus. With every other recent potential pandemic, there was a reasonable response, the severity of the diseases were responded to accordingly, panic was at a minimum, especially considering more recent scares have been with viruses that cause far more serious diseases than this latest one. This time, there's been an extreme focus on infection rates and zero focus on actual symptoms, which from every account i've seen so far, do not seem to be very terrifying for 99% of the population, yet the reaction has been just over the top everywhere. This is going to spread around the world, we'll either get it or we won't, it's not going anywhere, it's out in the world, as soon as the first person got sick and spread it, it was inevitable. There's so much effort globally going into trying to stop or hide from this and I still don't really understand why. When I was a kid, it was a regular thing to expose kids to chickenpox because it was just better to get it and get it over with, chickenpox sucked a whole lot. A whole lot more than having covid-19 would be from what I can tell. It's the symptoms of a disease that scare me, not whether i'll get it. Personally, I was a lot more worried about the recent flu virus from a few years back that was killing young healthy people, than this disease that's not much more than a bad cold unless you're knocking on death's door already or in your 80's. If people that get it, don't even realize they have it and nothing bad is really happening to them, then why should I be losing my shit and freaking out? Why should I be scared of getting a disease that's about the same as something I get nearly every year anyway?

dboreham 7y ago
I think you're slightly off track as to the frustration with lack of testing: Let's start with widespread complacency opposed to requests to take distancing measures: people (not me, but .. read FB comments from regular people on news stories) are mad at sports events being canceled because "nobody has the virus". So we don't get the social distancing response needed. If on the other hand we had some testing data from the general population, or even from just mildly sick people, then the requests for social distancing could be presented with "and we know this thing is here now, so these measures are going to have a significant effect".

avip 7y ago

Ignoring the controversial parts of your comment - voluntary distancing to the point of "work disobedience" is of extreme importance, and we developers should responsibly lead the charge and flat out stay home regardless any policy or management opinion. We have it easy we can trivially work from home and no one will fire us during this crisis. So don't wait just do it.

macintux 7y ago
> no one will fire us during this crisis There are many businesses out there that are going to be suffering heavily from the total collapse of tourism, downtown office work, community events, etc; I wouldn’t assume any job is sacrosanct given that level of belt tightening. In agree with the rest of your message, however.

Leary 7y ago

This is wrong on so many levels. Just because the tests are not 100% accurate does not mean they are useless. "if you think you have it you got it" This is patently false. Given potential asymptomatic spread, widespread testing is the only way to limit the virus like what South Korea did

molodec 7y ago

Work from home. This is great advice for people who work by typing commands on a computer. Seems like people who are in tech think that coding, chatting on slack, etc. is what work is all about. There are so many jobs out there that we depend on require that people physically come to work.

beatgammit 7y ago
I wonder what percent of jobs are reasonably safe to do (e.g. no forced close proximity to others). Office jobs are particularly bad and often easy to do from home, and many warehouse jobs don't have as close of proximity to other workers (many machines are operated by individuals), while jobs like trucking require almost none.

mindslight 7y ago

> Testing is NOT a solution This might be right, iff testing were some kind of binary choice that needed to be made one way or the other. But why should the tool of testing be politicized and debated, rather than it simply being one resource available to doctors to use as they see fit?