Re: what I mean by “rigorous testing...” At peak of production in WWII, GM was turning out a bomber roughly every hour. We saw in Japan and South Korea that new cases were effectively halted because everyone with symptoms was tested, isolated, and contacts were traced. A town in Italy experimented with testing everyone, and found about half the cases were asymptomatic. Months ago, the Federal government should have put private industry, all hands on deck, on producing millions and millions of tests and we should have tested everyone coming into a doctor’s office, clinic, ER, and in drive throughs, for free, everywhere. We were far too late, are still testing too few and don’t have a structured program to do anything once diagnosed. We can’t go back in time, but that testing and follow-on program must happen coming out of our collective shutdown to manage the curve.
John Oliver released a great video yesterday calling out pundits and politicians who are shaming Americans into ignoring their risk to sacrifice for the economy. Without a program like I described, they are flat out condemning people to die by the hundreds of thousands unnecessarily.
It is reasonable given the profile of this disease to expect a middle ground, and for much of the population to assume risk for the greater good. But doing so without a plan to manage the curve, including RIGOROUS testing — tens of millions of them, and a wartime effort to trace, isolate, and quarantine in individual isolation—is blatantly ignorant of science and callous to those who will suffocate.