abandonconflict
Well-Known Member
The amount of covid testing that the US has done was with almost no help from the federal government. It was achieved by many cometeing regional systems by obtaining what kits they could. It was still enough to put the US as one of the biggest covid testers. All I'm demonstrating here is the viability of a huge testing and tracing strategy.The US is testing more per capita than any country but Italy, now you said, what is it per capita that we are testing? Is it enough to even get reliable statistics to extrapolate out to the rest of the population? Who is getting tested, just the sick people? I know in Michigan healthcare workers are not getting tested yet, and the PPE gear is getting tight too in the hospitals. So if there is a wave of people leaving their relatively unexposed (if it wasn't already) homes to go back to work, if there is another wave and the hospitals are not fully restocked, we put them back at risk of having to deal with a bunch of new patients without proper protections. Instead we could wait a couple weeks while the states deal with getting everything their hospitals need while employers figure out how they are going to move forward safely.
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Testing
Here we show the share of reported tests returning a positive result – known as the positive rate.
ourworldindata.org
Some very useful graphs in this link and it's full of info. US went from almost no covid testing, to one of the world leaders, just like that. With federal money and far less than what was thrown at the economic stimulus or what will be lost to the lockdowns killing production and business, we could easily have a testing program like that of South Korea, scaled up for us. Tens of thousands people are currently already being hired by many disparate medical bodies and regional systems for contact tracing. Literally, in a matter of days all of this could be brought under federal control, along with temporary legislation completely violating privacy rights to have online covid mapping. The electronic surveillance aspect would be far easier and cheaper than it seems. It's already essentially ready.