3 ms·

Why are they not just being sent to everyone? There's a lot of potential good in sending them to people who will never request them.

awb 5y ago
Some people are anti-vaccine and some are even anti-testing. A large % of the red state population doesn’t want a test.
- Karsteski 5y ago
  What is with Americans viewing every issue through a red/blue, republicans/democrats or conservative/progressive lens?
  - jimmygrapes 5y ago
    We don't all do so, and the above poster is showing their bigotry with this assumption (and I'm sure I'll get some polling result to "prove" their assertion). Their last sentence could have and should have been left out.
    - vkou 5y ago
      It's not bigotry to observe that there's a significant portion of the population that believes things like 'COVID tests infect you with COVID.' It's just an observation of fact. My friend's parents (Stockton, CA) aren't getting tested for this reason. They didn't get tested the first time they came down with 'Valley Fever', back in 2020, either. (They also quit their jobs because of vaccination requirements, and believe that Trump won in 2020, and that he will reclaim the presidency on <a number of dates that have long passed>. It doesn't make me a bigot to point this sort of thing out, or that these beliefs tend to cluster.)
  - shepherdjerred 5y ago
    Because it’s the dominant division of people here
  - vmception 5y ago
    Because the union is barely hanging together like in the 1850s on very binary topics
  - liquidise 5y ago
    Excuse the rant but i have a working theory that it is an unchecked feedback cycle that's decades old, only now based on political party. People generally hold sweeping, often negative, opinions of "those people". Over the decades, "those people" has been defined by race, religion, ethnicity, etc. Today in the US it is which political party people perceive you to be affiliated with. I call this a feedback cycle because in my experience the people using this sort of rhetoric aren't interested in being proven wrong. They have chosen consciously or otherwise to vilify a group, or buy into preexisting vilification. Undoing that is hard work so it just doesn't happen. Absent any pressure, people assume themselves correct and chalk up another datapoint confirming their own biases. This is readily apparent in response to any mass killing/tragedy. My more politically extreme friends seem to race for any evidence they can find that they perpetrator is Democrat/Republican. Of course this boils down to pure speculation (gun ownership, smokes pot, etc), but the urgency and desire is there all the same. In summary it is little surprise that the politicians in Washington are so hardlined on their stances and party affiliations. This is effectively the government the voters have demanded. When the citizens of a country start vilify half the country, their representatives reaching across the isle is political suicide. And thus we sit.
    - awb 5y ago
      > the people using this sort of rhetoric aren't interested in being proven wrong. They have chosen consciously or otherwise to vilify a group, or buy into preexisting vilification. I’d love to be proven wrong on this point. Any data you can share that red/blue is not the most efficient segmentation for pro/anti-vaxx and/or pro/anti-test?
      - liquidise 5y ago
        Off the cuff: Blacks in the US are the lowest vaccinated racial group (44%) in spite of voting the strongest for Biden/Harris (87%)[1]. This is part of the problem with the broad strokes approach, it completely erases trends like this. I tried making a trend line comparing Vax % by state to Biden vote %. Interesting result[1] that i think supports both of our arguments. A trend line exists to support your claim, though i would argue it's not a great fit and the data is quite scattered. I should also say i didn't mean to harsh address your comment specifically. I don't dispute the trend you claimed i was more ranting about the larger categorization that my parent comment was asking about. Linking my sources[2][3] as well. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... 2: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rieowmakzvfzuv/vax%20vs%20demo%20vote.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rieowmakzvfzuv/vax%20vs%20demo%20... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... 4: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    - bcrosby95 5y ago
      Lol. I know plenty of Republicans and Democrats who agree with eachother as to who is male and female. In both directions. Party affiliation is more about what your priorities are rather than where you lie on any random issue.
      - _-david-_ 5y ago
        I was using the trans issue as an example. It is harder to come together when we start from completely different starting points.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  Agreed. Some people feel that the mass asymptomatic testing serves to give perpetual fodder for sensationalist media headlines, as well as justification for public officials to impose new rounds of lockdowns, etc. As such those people believe that participating in asymptomatic testing only worsens those problems by creating "cases" in the absence of any actual clinical problem (that is to say, declaring people who are asymptomatic as COVID-19 positive even though COVID is an acronym that includes the word "disease"). They may also be against the general idea of constantly testing for the presence of a specific respiratory virus, however unique SARS-CoV-2 may be. Better to ship the tests to the people that actually want them. -- As an aside, you're right about "a large % of the red state population(s)", but I'd add that most "blue" people seem to think republicans are much more anti-vax / anti-test than they are. A majority of republicans are vaccinated, and a majority appear to support masking (at least indoors), or at the least are willing to begrudgingly comply. Here in California I feel like I meet a lot of people that seem to think that republicans are overwhelmingly "anti-vax" or, even more humorously, that Trump is anti-vax (humorous because his vocal praise of "boosters" and incessant bragging that he deserves credit for the vaccines and that the vaccines+lockdowns saved tens/hundreds of millions of lives, is one of his most unpopular stances with his base)
- iszomer 5y ago
  Sure, let's just bombard every household with testing kits like we did with mail-in ballots.
VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
that would be enormously wasteful
freewilly1040 5y ago
That dramatically increase the logistics problem, it’s not as though the government has a reliable address for where each person would want a test shipped. People who are worried about omicron and can afford $15 per test already have a supply. People who aren’t worried about omicron will throw them away.

awb 5y ago

Some people are anti-vaccine and some are even anti-testing. A large % of the red state population doesn’t want a test.

Karsteski 5y ago
What is with Americans viewing every issue through a red/blue, republicans/democrats or conservative/progressive lens?
- jimmygrapes 5y ago
  We don't all do so, and the above poster is showing their bigotry with this assumption (and I'm sure I'll get some polling result to "prove" their assertion). Their last sentence could have and should have been left out.
  - vkou 5y ago
    It's not bigotry to observe that there's a significant portion of the population that believes things like 'COVID tests infect you with COVID.' It's just an observation of fact. My friend's parents (Stockton, CA) aren't getting tested for this reason. They didn't get tested the first time they came down with 'Valley Fever', back in 2020, either. (They also quit their jobs because of vaccination requirements, and believe that Trump won in 2020, and that he will reclaim the presidency on <a number of dates that have long passed>. It doesn't make me a bigot to point this sort of thing out, or that these beliefs tend to cluster.)
- shepherdjerred 5y ago
  Because it’s the dominant division of people here
- vmception 5y ago
  Because the union is barely hanging together like in the 1850s on very binary topics
- liquidise 5y ago
  Excuse the rant but i have a working theory that it is an unchecked feedback cycle that's decades old, only now based on political party. People generally hold sweeping, often negative, opinions of "those people". Over the decades, "those people" has been defined by race, religion, ethnicity, etc. Today in the US it is which political party people perceive you to be affiliated with. I call this a feedback cycle because in my experience the people using this sort of rhetoric aren't interested in being proven wrong. They have chosen consciously or otherwise to vilify a group, or buy into preexisting vilification. Undoing that is hard work so it just doesn't happen. Absent any pressure, people assume themselves correct and chalk up another datapoint confirming their own biases. This is readily apparent in response to any mass killing/tragedy. My more politically extreme friends seem to race for any evidence they can find that they perpetrator is Democrat/Republican. Of course this boils down to pure speculation (gun ownership, smokes pot, etc), but the urgency and desire is there all the same. In summary it is little surprise that the politicians in Washington are so hardlined on their stances and party affiliations. This is effectively the government the voters have demanded. When the citizens of a country start vilify half the country, their representatives reaching across the isle is political suicide. And thus we sit.
  - awb 5y ago
    > the people using this sort of rhetoric aren't interested in being proven wrong. They have chosen consciously or otherwise to vilify a group, or buy into preexisting vilification. I’d love to be proven wrong on this point. Any data you can share that red/blue is not the most efficient segmentation for pro/anti-vaxx and/or pro/anti-test?
    - liquidise 5y ago
      Off the cuff: Blacks in the US are the lowest vaccinated racial group (44%) in spite of voting the strongest for Biden/Harris (87%)[1]. This is part of the problem with the broad strokes approach, it completely erases trends like this. I tried making a trend line comparing Vax % by state to Biden vote %. Interesting result[1] that i think supports both of our arguments. A trend line exists to support your claim, though i would argue it's not a great fit and the data is quite scattered. I should also say i didn't mean to harsh address your comment specifically. I don't dispute the trend you claimed i was more ranting about the larger categorization that my parent comment was asking about. Linking my sources[2][3] as well. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... 2: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rieowmakzvfzuv/vax%20vs%20demo%20vote.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/3rieowmakzvfzuv/vax%20vs%20demo%20... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election#Results_by_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia... 4: https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/ https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-st...
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  - bcrosby95 5y ago
    Lol. I know plenty of Republicans and Democrats who agree with eachother as to who is male and female. In both directions. Party affiliation is more about what your priorities are rather than where you lie on any random issue.
    - _-david-_ 5y ago
      I was using the trans issue as an example. It is harder to come together when we start from completely different starting points.
__blockcipher__ 5y ago
Agreed. Some people feel that the mass asymptomatic testing serves to give perpetual fodder for sensationalist media headlines, as well as justification for public officials to impose new rounds of lockdowns, etc. As such those people believe that participating in asymptomatic testing only worsens those problems by creating "cases" in the absence of any actual clinical problem (that is to say, declaring people who are asymptomatic as COVID-19 positive even though COVID is an acronym that includes the word "disease"). They may also be against the general idea of constantly testing for the presence of a specific respiratory virus, however unique SARS-CoV-2 may be. Better to ship the tests to the people that actually want them. -- As an aside, you're right about "a large % of the red state population(s)", but I'd add that most "blue" people seem to think republicans are much more anti-vax / anti-test than they are. A majority of republicans are vaccinated, and a majority appear to support masking (at least indoors), or at the least are willing to begrudgingly comply. Here in California I feel like I meet a lot of people that seem to think that republicans are overwhelmingly "anti-vax" or, even more humorously, that Trump is anti-vax (humorous because his vocal praise of "boosters" and incessant bragging that he deserves credit for the vaccines and that the vaccines+lockdowns saved tens/hundreds of millions of lives, is one of his most unpopular stances with his base)
iszomer 5y ago
Sure, let's just bombard every household with testing kits like we did with mail-in ballots.

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago

that would be enormously wasteful

freewilly1040 5y ago

That dramatically increase the logistics problem, it’s not as though the government has a reliable address for where each person would want a test shipped. People who are worried about omicron and can afford $15 per test already have a supply. People who aren’t worried about omicron will throw them away.