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> “It tells you, you don’t know who’s at risk. You don’t know what you need to do to contain the virus if you don’t actually have the details or facts,” said Ma
by JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
> “It tells you, you don’t know who’s at risk. You don’t know what you need to do to contain the virus if you don’t actually have the details or facts,” said Marty Martinez, Boston’s chief of Health and Human Services.
Plans to reopen states are conditioned on testing, but how long --and will we ever-- have enough testing data (among the general population, not just those showing symptoms) to make the informed decision?
If we can't get the cotton swabs, the reagents, with the ability to test nationwide at scale, health policy experts will not be positioned to green light re-opening.
- cmurf 7y agoWell to do folks can work from home, or not work from vacation homes, have all their needs delivered, and not catch this thing. All the "essential" people will catch it and some will die, and the well off will consider this very cheap, good, proper, and mandatory for economic reasons. It's hardly worse than the exploitation for profit of the tobacco industry. Known for decades it would maim and kill, but millions invested in, were shareholders, were owners. And they've never been sanctioned. This will be no different. The lower class will take one for the team, again, for the greater good of society so that the better classes can live with minimal inconvenience. By all rights, essential workers should quit. But they have a boot on their head: landlords and debts. It's economic coercion.
- WalterBright 7y agoIt's been well known for over a century that smoking is a slow poison. The well off smoked as much or more than the not so well off. My dad, who went to high school in the 1930's, said they were known as "coffin nails" then. Any doctor who cut open a smoker knew what smoking did to the lungs.
- eddieplan9 7y agoThat's a very cynical view. Doctors are by no means lower class. Most if not all of them can quit, and are not subject to "economic coercion". Yet almost of them choose to work and overwork. I am not an "essential" and am working from home, but I donate and try to help my local community, and if I am called to help in other ways, I will. And no, I don't actively invest in tobacco.
- gizmo686 7y agoMany doctors have a substantial amount of debt from med school that they took on with the assumption of having a doctor's income.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y agoI think there's a common misunderstanding here. The value of testing is that it enables effective contact tracing. (Ideally, you want quick and regular tests for every identified contact, so that if they do have it they can be isolated before they start coughing.) There's no data-driven strategy to compute how safe it is to open up - that's determined subjectively based on general trends.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoSoon there'll be a different kind of pressure. The Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, SD is closed because of 500 coronavirus cases amongst the employees. Several other plants are idled now because they are downstream of the South Dakota plant. This is a cut of 5 % of the pork supply in the United States. Several Tyson chicken processing plants in Georgia also have coronavirus outbreaks. Everyone thought that food shortages due to the COVID-19 pandemic were a very remote possibility, but it seems they are coming, and the government can't permit that. Food riots are precursors to revolutions.