4/2/2020 Post: Testing, Testing, and More Testing

President Trump Shows Covid-19 Testing Device at Recent Presser

In the big scheme of things, I understand how things transpired, so I get the reasons "why", but I do believe that we'd have been better off had we started testing sooner. I don't think it would surely have changed too much, but had we started a week or so sooner, we'd have started our hated social distancing a week sooner. And, yes, everyone hates it, but it's still the right play right now. Under the Trump Administration, the US is testing like crazy now, testing 100,000+ people per day. Surely at some point we're caught up with the slow start. But, on the subject of testing, I think we still have a long way to go. I don't think 100,000 a day is enough.

First, there are still many people complaining of symptoms NOT being tested. I don't know how many more than 100,000 per day we'd need to test to meet that need, so without any basis other than a WAG (Wild Ass Guess), I'll say that needs to increase to 150,000 or even to 200,000. Call it 175,000 as a split the difference.

New Rutgers Machine Can Process Thousands of Tests Per Day

The second place we need more testing is recurrent tests for medical personnel. Doctors, nurses, EMTs, and other front-line medical care givers should be tested on some kind of a recurring interval: once a week, every 10 days, two weeks, or monthly. I don't know what's right, but these awesome caregivers are facing the virus in patients day in, and day out, oftentimes for long hours without breaks. We need to protect these people AND their patients by more widespread monitoring than what we have in place now. Is 50,000 tests a day enough? Just another WAG, but whether it's 50,000 or 100,000 additional tests per day, we should have widespread testing of our medica personnel. Let's call it 50,000.

And lastly, we need random testing of the population, across the country. We need to monitor and identify the virus as it hides in and amongst us in the population. If you're going to ask us to shelter in place, and order us the "stay at home", it's tough on morale, it's even tougher on the economy. We need, BADLY, to get people back to work as soon as we can. If we were doing enough random testing, nationwide and tallied and reported by locality, perhaps we can begin loosening restrictions by location. I don't know how many tests would need to be administered daily to identify where the virus is, and in what numbers it is found there, but enough random tests to paint a statistically valid model. And I don't know that we need to do this daily, every other day, or even weekly. That's for the statisticians. So, for my last WAG, I'll call it another 25,000 per day.

Drive Through Covid-19 Testing Site

I'm not overly critical of the slow start to testing. And I am not underselling the magnitude of the effort it took to bring us to where we are now, testing 100,000 people a day. I'm just saying it doesn't seem to me to be enough. We need enough so every symptomatic person is tested, our medical front line people are given recurrent tests, and we need widespread random testing of our at large population. When I add my three guesses together, that's an additional 250,000 tests above and beyond the 100,000, an increase by a magnitude of 2.5 above and beyond what we're doing now. So yeah, they've done a bang-up job getting caught up and back on track. But it's not enough.

Is it ever enough? Will it ever be enough? Smarter people than me will figure it out.

Testing 1,2,3....