Post 70 - May 20, 2020
Day 70…
For the last few days, Governor Cuomo has been saying that New York state now has the ability to test 40,000 people a day.
There are now 700 testing sites throughout the state.
The Governor is concerned, however, that nobody’s going to get tested.
My question is why?
Not why aren’t people going to get tested, but at this point, why would they get tested?
As of today, all 50 states have now begun to reopen.
Connecticut was the last state to start.
At the same time, CDC has just now released a detailed set of guidelines for states to follow as they reopen.
Um… A little late.
The guidelines are pretty specific and talk about how social distancing should work in restaurants, schools, mass transit, childcare centers.
If you look across the 50 states, some are already following some of that, and some aren’t.
Oklahomans can go to a club and dance.
In deciding to reopen, states should be able to demonstrate a steady 14-day decline in cases.
Hmm… not so much in a lot of states.
Some, like Texas, are even still rising.
Most importantly, there is an extremely limited capability, nationwide, to do contact tracing, something that the CDC calls a “core disease control measure”.
Contrast what’s happening here with what’s happening in South Korea.
To begin with, South Korea has a single-payer healthcare system that made testing and treatment free for all of its citizens.
Half of all of the new cases, there, in recent weeks have come from overseas.
At the main airport in Seoul, there is a walk-through testing facility for anyone with symptoms and a follow up to insure than everyone else gets tested within three days.
All arrivals have to download and install a government smartphone app that tracks their location and asks them to report any symptoms that develop.
After a mandatory quarantine period of two weeks, people can then delete the app from their phones.
Plans for location tracking bracelets for people who left their phones at home and broke quarantine were abandoned after human rights groups objected.
It is still, however, considered a crime in South Korea to break quarantine.
In Seoul, health authorities can now use, CCTV footage, credit card transactions, travel information and location data to track patients.
Using all of this, they can usually track somebody down in about 10 minutes.
It is a nation-wide, unified effort that is working.
It is worth noting that South Korea and the United States identified their first cases of COVID-19 on the same day.
In Seoul, restaurants, parks and malls have reopened.
When somebody tests positive, the government can trace and track almost anyone that that person came in contact with.
The government plans to keep these measures in place for months, or years, if necessary.
What is happening in South Korea won’t happen here.
We are a federation of 50 different states linked together by an overseeing federal government.
All 50 states have a great deal of autonomy.
A strong President can offer leadership and guidance and federal legislation to keep the states in line with a coordinated effort, but we don’t have that now.
We have a President who has abdicated all responsibility for coordinating this effort, so the completely unsurprising result is that each of the 50 states is moving forward on their own, under their own rationales and guidelines.
We Americans have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that might even possibly infringe upon our rights.
There are already people who have said that they won’t get the vaccine when it comes because the government will use it to inject us all with tracking microchips.
The government doesn’t need to inject us with microchips.
The government already has plenty of ability to track us.
Every time we use a credit card, an ATM, pay a toll, go online, make a call, we are traceable.
If your computer is on and you have a discussion about buying a car, car advertising will start to appear in some of your social media apps.
Somebody’s listening.
The government doesn’t need to inject us with microchips, we’ve already done it ourselves.
Willingly.
This virus cannot be fought politically.
You can’t put a travel ban in place against Chinese nationals and then allow other nationalities in.
You can’t put a ban in place that keeps some European countries out and allows other ones in.
The virus is an equal opportunity bit of RNA.
It doesn’t differentiate between nationalities.
Our federal leadership has politicized every single response that it has had, to fighting this virus. What they should have been doing was just fighting the virus.
The White House has demonized the CDC and the WHO.
Yes, they have made mistakes and missteps, some quite serious, but that’s no excuse to throw the baby out with the bath water.
Without them, we are following the whims of a President who knows nothing about the virus whatsoever.
This morning he proudly announced that the high rate of cases in the US should be seen as a badge of honor.
States are misrepresenting data or even outright suppressing it when it conflicts with what the politicians want.
The CDC released their guidelines so late because they were trying to navigate through the partisan politics.
Releasing guidelines about how to slowly and carefully get your horse out of the barn is somewhat pointless when the horse is already out grazing in the field.
We needed the testing two months ago when this all began.
When Michael and I got sick in early March, we did our best to get tested but there were none available.
Testing was limited to people with severe symptoms which we did not have.
At THAT point, everybody should have been tested because we already knew that people without symptoms were carrying it.
At that point we were only testing people who were too sick to leave their homes.
Asymptomatic carriers continue to spread it.
At this point in time, unless the state makes it mandatory to get tested, people are not really going to do it.
If they aren’t sick and can’t go to work, why would they?
If it isn’t being done across the boards and subsequently tracked, then really what does it do.
It’s like learning another language that you never have occasion to use - great but why?
Leaving the human rights issue aside for the moment, and only dealing with the science, this is, I think, one way how testing could be effective.
You decide to reopen a construction site.
All workers are tested and given a bracelet saying that they are clear.
Maybe give out a different color to those who have the antibodies.
Those people are then allowed to go to work on their construction site.
The clear people get tested every couple of days and if anyone of them, at any point, tests positive then the rest of the crew and the people they are living with are immediately quarantined and tested.
On a phone app, an alert then goes out to the city, saying that a person has tested positive and traveled back and forth from the Bronx to Manhattan on the D train at 8am and 6pm.
Those who may have come in contact with person X are urged to get tested themselves right away.
When the crew is cleared, they go back to work.
To really effectively fight this virus, that’s the kind of thing that would need to happen.
It’s never going to happen.
I’m not even suggesting that it should.
Despite the fact that I know that the government can already track me, I don’t want to make it any easier for them.
What should be happening now, though, is that politicians, scientists and human rights advocates, instead of fighting with each other, should all be working together to figure out a way through this pandemic.
We have to weigh where our greatest discomfort lies on the scale of virus containment vs. human rights vs. danger to the economy.
There’s a saying that everyone’s a socialist in a crisis.
The ardent capitalists are, of course, the first ones to ask for government handouts when there’s a problem.
The market should rule… until it can’t.
The market is not going to solve this crisis.
I am not for a minute saying that we should all be microchipped and give up our rights.
I think, though, that we have to be clear and honest about what rights we have already given up over the last few decades.
There needs to be serious discussion about how to weather this storm that keep us safe, our economy alive and our rights intact.
Politicians are not equipped to deal with this themselves.
We have more than ample evidence for that.
Virologists can only tell us how to fight the virus, not how to save the economy or our rights.
We are getting more and more evidence with each passing day that we, the people, are not equipped to deal with this ourselves, either.
We seem to be running amok.
South Korea is finding a way through this.
That way will not work, as things stand, here in America.
That way is not open to us.
If there is one way through, though, then there has to be another one that will work for US.
Let’s find it.
Rationally, calmly and thoughtfully.
Together.