Res Ipsa wrote:EAllusion wrote:Clear your cookies Rep. The story on one level is about the quixotic efforts of the Seattle flu project to be adapted into a corona testing system. On another level, the bad one, it is about how bureaucratic rules, adopted for sensible reasons, led to bureaucrats delaying a sensible response by unreasonably setting up barriers that they did not take down fast enough. It led to a major screw up.
Your rhetorical food for thought seems to be asking, “how important is testing anyway?” I think the answer there is very if only to inform resource management.
In other news, apparently the Trump admin is doing this:
https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/ ... ssion=true
Sorry I don’t have time to distill a ton of information into a few pithy sentences. But your extrapolation of my bottom line is wrong. I’m not questioning the value of testing. I’m questioning the value of mass testing with this type of test. What I read from disease experts and epidemiologists is that testing for diagnosis of individual patients should be done when there is medical benefit in doing so. Surveillance testing should also be done, through an organized system of data collection so we can make good use of the data. We have flu surveillance systems that COVID testing can be integrated into. But the PCR test is ill suited for that because taking the test sample induced the mechanism that spreads the disease. (Effective swabbing makes one cough and or sneeze. But mass testing anyone who demands a test isn’t good surveillance testing because we have clue how representative that kind of self selected sample is.
I read late last night that China and Singapore have started to deploy a serum antibody test. That’s the tool we need to add COVID surveillance to our existing flu surveillance network. A blood test doesn’t induce coughing. The existing flu surveillance tests are blood tests.
Just as importantly, a negative PCR test only tells you whether you have enough virus on board today for the test to detect. It can’t tell you if you’ve had the disease. A Sun antibody test tells the patient and the health surveillance system whether they’ve had the disease.
TL/DR Testing is not cost less. We have to allocate the resources we have in a little to no evidence that testing every American with the test we have today is a smart use of resources.
Rep, I was trying to interpret cryptic wondering in the context of what otherwise was a reply to a Twitter summary of an article I linked. The value of the type of early testing that couldn't penetrate red tape was that it would've cast a crude dragnet that could've helped slow spread of the disease by having some infected individuals quarantine sooner and provide more detailed information about the extent of penetrance sooner than it was known. It wouldn't have been a adequate population sample, but I don't think that means it would've been without use. What wasn't approved of ultimately moved along, so I don't think that notion is out of line.
Of course they have. I can only imagine the response here in the tri-state area if the DOH catered to a single religion like this. It is unreal that this is acceptable in Utah. 
) but I did go around to size up the situation.