4 ms·
Yes, what I'm saying is we should have the detection programs in place ahead of time so in the future we can more intelligently develop specific and appropriate
by jjk166 6y ago
Yes, what I'm saying is we should have the detection programs in place ahead of time so in the future we can more intelligently develop specific and appropriate interventions and countermeasures.
The US didn't identify any cases of covid until weeks after we now know the disease to have been here, and it took months to identify community spread. By the point we realized there was a problem, there was no realistic hope of containing it.
If we had been screening international travelers even with a slow test prone to false positives, like a generic coronavirus test, we would have known earlier that we had a problem, and that information could be given to contact tracers to contain the problem. Rather than scrambling to come up with specific and appropriate interventions and countermeasures as our hospitals were being overrun, we could have taken the time to develop a well thought out system and been ready by the time community spread could not be contained.
Looking at the future, imagine what it would do to every year's flu season if screening for fevers were common. Imagine if you got an alert that someone on your flight was identified by a camera as coughing a lot while standing in line for their TSA check? With minimal inconvenience we could be much better informed about the real-time state of public health, and change our behavior accordingly so we and especially the at-risk get sick less often.
- dredmorbius 6y agoGenerally agreed. Note that there was major pushback against even having such monitoring though, a trend which still persists (the Rebekah Jones/Florida story, despite some additional elements, South Dakota's Kristi Noem https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/19/kristi-noem-trump-strategy-denial-covid-ravages-south-dakota https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/19/kristi-noem-...). Donald Trump has been ridiculed for responding to the bad news on Covid-19 by suggesting that the U.S. is simply conducting too many tests. “Without testing, or weak testing, we would be showing almost no cases,” he complained. Or as he put it at a recent news conference: “When you test, you create cases.” https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-11/president-trump-s-view-on-covid-19-tests-shows-he-s-an-algorithm https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-11/presid... "I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault." "Cases are going up in the U.S. because we are testing far more than any other country, and ever expanding. With smaller testing we would show fewer cases!" https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/covid-timeline-what-did-trump-say-and-when https://www.thestreet.com/mishtalk/economics/covid-timeline-... When within the decisionmaking and executive function there is resistance to and denial of data .... well, needing better monitoring is certainly a problem, but it's not your biggest problem. Not unique to the US FWIW: "Coronavirus: Turkey’s new COVID-19 numbers confirm experts’ worst fears'" (29 November 2020) https://english.alarabiya.net/en/coronavirus/2020/11/29/Coronavirus-Turkey-s-new-COVID-19-numbers-confirm-experts-worst-fears https://english.alarabiya.net/en/coronavirus/2020/11/29/Coro...