Testing, testing, testing… So now that President Trump and his team have expertly managed the ventilator situation and were able to ensure everyone who needed a ventilator got a ventilator, the fake news media have moved on to screaming about inadequate testing.
We must all be tested to see if we are infected with the coronavirus, the media say.
Why?
Well, so we know if it’s safe to go back to work or school, the media say.
Okay, so I get tested, am told I’m not infected, and go back to work and school, right?
There you go! It’s the only solution, the media say.
But what if I touch a door on the way out of the testing place and become infected?
And it’s here the media have nothing to say.
Is that what we want, to test everyone, all 325 million of us, to give everyone who tests negative a dangerous and false sense of security when they could easily infect themselves minutes after passing that test?
“Testing everyone” is obviously my shorthand for the madness being pushed by the media. And to be perfectly honest, my shorthand downplays what the media are demanding. What they want is the equivalent (and this is no exaggeration) of “testing everyone” every two weeks.
The demand is for 20 to 30 million tests per day.
As I’ll explain in a bit, testing is obviously important. Testing everyone, however, is pointless, it’s useless… It’s a total waste of resources and probably impossible to achieve. And this is why, no matter what the experts say, no matter what Dr. Deborah Birx and Dr. Anthony Fauci say, the media have set this impossible standard of 20 to 30 million tests per day.
You see, the media have decided to set a futile and unnecessary goal, a catch-22, just so they can point to Trump and say he failed.
The other reason the media want all this testing done is that it increases our country’s infection numbers. Because America is doing way-way-way more testing than any other country, our infection numbers look way higher by comparison.
Of course, all this testing has also decreased America’s mortality rate to a number way lower than every country whose numbers can be trusted (i.e., not China and Iran), but our fake media don’t want to talk about that.
This isn’t an argument against all testing. Far from it. Antibody testing, the test to see who has already had the Chinese virus, will be crucial for the clinical trials utilizing plasma as a coronavirus remedy. And if we discover you cannot be reinfected, antibody testing will be crucial to see who can return to a normal life. If you are not at risk of getting sick, you won’t infect anyone else. That’s the perfect position to be in. So let’s hope these anecdotal stories about people being reinfected turn out to be mistaken, turn out to be people who were not yet fully recovered.
And, of course, testing people to see if they have been infected is also vital. But this has to be done efficiently and logically.
If we want to reopen our country, a vigorous but reasonable amount of testing will be crucial. We obviously need to be able to test everyone who’s symptomatic and everyone the symptomatic come in contact with.
Thankfully, according to the experts, that will not be a problem as states and localities move into the first reopening phase.
We also need to test the general population enough just to find out how widespread the disease is and to ensure no more hot spots flare up that might crash the healthcare system because that would be a true catastrophe, one — thank God — we have, so far, avoided.
Don’t forget the virus is still out there, and until there’s a vaccine, the virus will remain out there. So unless you want to remain in lockdown for the 12 to 18 months it will take to create and distribute a vaccine, it is not at all improbable that millions, maybe tens of millions of us, will eventually become infected.
Mitigation is about slowing the spread, not stopping the spread… Until there’s a vaccine, the spread will continue to spread. All we can do is what’s necessary to ensure our state and local health systems don’t crash. We want to be able to save everyone who can be saved.
And that’s what the testing is primarily for: to ensure infections don’t explode to where the system crashes, to where triage is necessary.
Testing everyone is useless, testing the equivalent of everyone every two weeks — 20 to 30 million per day — is like asking Trump to empty the ocean with a spoon. And due to the false sense of security it could create, that kind of testing could even be dangerous.
But our sociopathic media don’t care about that. Public health will never be a higher priority than defeating the Orange Bad Man.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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