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Too little, too late, at least for OECD countries. We're already starting to manufacture and distribute vaccines; ramping up new testing & tracing infrastructur
by ashtonkem 6y ago
Too little, too late, at least for OECD countries. We're already starting to manufacture and distribute vaccines; ramping up new testing & tracing infrastructure is likely to have very little impact now[0], and would not be worth committing any public resources to. This might be helpful for countries that are going to be on the end of the vaccination list, but even for developing nations this will be much more expensive than vaccines (at least one company has promised to sell to poor nations at cost, which IIRC is $3-4 per shot).
0 - Test & trace is both more valuable early in the pandemic because you can save more lives, but also because these techniques have an upper limit on how many cases the system can handle. Once sizeable chunks of the population have the disease, no test & trace system cat possibly keep up. If we'd had this months ago, we possibly could have stopped this pandemic in its tracks.
- worker767424 6y agoI remember seeing lines of cars on the news for people getting tests before Thanksgiving, and every clinic in my area being out of appointments for tests. We knew people were going to see family for Thanksgiving, and people wanted to do be safe about it, but we didn't make it easy for them. I'll call out Fauci for not sounding the alarm on this one. He's mostly been preachy about what to do and what not to do. In September, he should have been pushing for cheap rapid tests behind the scenes. In November, he should have started saying "stay home if you can, but we know you're going to want to see family, so we made it super easy to get tested." Fauci has basically been following the sex-ed abstinence script, and it's well-documented how well that works.