Covid-19 Testing

Good testing regimes save lives and economies

Testing for all

Mantra: “Test, test, test.”

Just kidding. Don’t test widely.

Risky. (Might learn truth).

Rhetoric v Reality

“Health workers valued!”

Test us all, before we die?

Nah, trillions, elsewhere.

Science v Dogma

Test all, fast, often.

Science: Saves lives, ends lockdown.

Dogma: Rules are rules.

Science v Dogma (2)

“Test the elderly”

Science: Full testing saves lives

Dogma: Watch them die.

Lockdown care workers

Visit ill, infirm -

Six per week, no masks, gowns, screens.

Corona Roulette!

— — — —

Full-population testing persistently ignored

There are growing calls for more testing in many countries. Some appears reactive. Likewise, some political responses — boosting testing seemingly without much strategy, as if to be seen to be doing something.

However, many calls for more effective testing regimes are evidence-based, yet despite the twin prospect of saving lives and re-opening shuttered economies quicker and with more certainty, some authorities resist widespread testing.

This is curious, particularly because some countries are already implementing strategic testing regimes, and there is evidence of effectiveness — for example, South Korea, Viet Nam, and Germany, and a full-population case study successfully eradicated Covid-19 in the middle of Europe’s worst outbreak.

Health workers lionized, and cannon-fodder

Healthcare workers have been unnecessarily thrust into the front line by leaders failing to address the virus quickly enough, and now stubbornly persisting with lockdown as “the” policy rather than a briefly necessary intervention before pivoting to more effective measures.

Around the world, health care workers have risen to the challenge.

Amidst widespread appreciation for their tremendous effort, and sacrifice, authorities often claim that it too hard to test all health workers. In some places, exposed health workers are just told to self-isolate for 14 days rather than be tested, despite the critical importance of health workers in a pandemic.

Never mind, apparently, the mental health effects daily facing clear and present danger, and the deaths of many of their colleagues, poorly supported in critical areas, including personal protective equipment, and comprehensive testing — both for themselves, and for prospective patients that might not become patients if authorities focused on serious mass testing.

Curious, too, given the trillions of dollars spent on economies instead, by leaders claiming not to put money before lives.

More so, because researchers have declared mass population testing vital, valuable, and feasible. One researcher in the UK noted that 10 million tests could be undertaken daily, at a cost so tiny it wouldn’t even register as a rounding error in the vast sums splurged by governments in an effort to counter economic devastation that, arguably, was caused more by politians’ actions than the virus itself.

Tragi-ironically, full-population testing would also help cauterize those costs.

Rest-home residents and in-home carers, known risk, allowed to run

In some countries, even as rest home deaths increase, elderly residents are refused testing, despite extreme vulnerability.

Likewise, health care workers — rightly regarded ‘essential workers’ — continuing to visit patients in their homes during lockdown. Some patients see many different carers each week.

Authorities in some countries continue to assert ‘standards’ that limit testing to symptomatic people only. A corollary is that care workers are not given masks, and only provided with personal protective equipment (PPE) when symptoms appear.

Again, authorities cite ‘standards’ for PPE supply, and testing, despite the known scientific evidence that most people with the disease will be asymptomatic, and combined with its long incubation period, could be silently passing it on, unknowingly — especially in rest homes and with ill, infirm, disabled, and immuno-compromised patients.

Oddly, the prospect of prevention, and the opportunity for early identification and treatment, seems to have escaped the attention of health authorities staunchly adhering to ‘standards’ — as if madness, carefully crafted into words, presented in a commanding font, grandly entitled ‘testing protocols’, thereby anointed sacrosanct, is not still madness.

Likewise, disregarded, evidence that widespread testing saves lives, as South Korea and Germany illustrate, and the results of case studies showing the benefits of full-population testing.

Tragi-ironic abounds. Full-population testing would typically start with healthcare workers, the elderly and infirm.

Curious, too, that such ‘standards’ were set by the same officials asserting them as impediment. The asserted ‘blockage’ is evidently illusory, a mere whimsy that could be removed at the stroke of their own pen.

Lockdowns save lives. Lockdown as strategy also kills people, and wrecks economies

A simple truth evades many governments, it seems.

Lockdowns are both necessary, and wrong.

Explained in Lockdown, leaders must do lockdowns well, but also get out of a lockdown mentality, fast — to save lives AND economies.

In policy terms, to save lives and economies when the virus first appeared required a fast pivot from anticipated influenza pandemic response strategies to more effective strategies needed to combat this virus (asymptomatic transmission, longer incubation period, and higher lethality), to avoid debilitating lockdowns as the last resort to slow transmission. That time has now past.

Now to save lives and economies also requires a fast policy pivot, from “lockdown” as an interim strategy to more effective measures, to save lives and economies. Unfortunately, despite “health or economy” being a false choice, the World Health Organization is still pressing “health first,” thereby reinforcing the dichotomy, and, ironically, prompting actions that risk worsening public health and economic outcomes.

This pivot too is seemingly destined to be missed in many countries.

— — — —