Forget all the people telling you that this isn’t a real pandemic, the disease is mild, and that it’ll only last a couple of weeks. Dude, really? Hasn’t anyone told you the truth yet? We already know the science and the evidence; we can see what’s happening around us. The pandemic, like every other epidemic, it is growing exponentially. Being America doesn’t change that. The outbreak will hit here pretty much like it did in every other country that didn’t prepare. The SARS-CoV2 pandemic is in the early stages, but it’s accelerating up that same sharp curve. And despite saying that and knowing it’s true, we still won’t change. The result will be harsh but not surprising. The epidemic will arrive sooner than we’re ready, it will hit us harder than we’ve prepared for, it will get much worse every day, and it will last much longer than we pretend.
We know that the epidemic will be bad, but we’re not acting on what we know. We allow our elected leaders to lie to us. Their boneheaded stupidity may kill over a million of us, but we allow it. And our press, the esteemed Fourth Estate? For all their high and smug self-regard, they barely challenge the authorities when they spout what everyone knows is happy horseshit.
Start at the top. The Trump Republican Party is doing a horrifically ham-handed job in the federal SARS-CoV2 response. Worse than their usual work, if that’s even possible. And when the President says there are all the tests we need, nobody in the press even bothers to say, “But Mister President, that’s a lie. It’s not true.” I watched today’s WH press event and it was the usual parade of administrative masturbation. Our national health was on fire, everyone in the administration fell over each other praising the President, and nobody in the press even suggested their endless stories of huge and massive successes weren’t just tissue-paper lies.
How about the legislature? The House feels the urgency, but the Senate is barely twitching. Here’s a question: are all Republicans really deep-cover Russian agents tasked with breaking America apart from the inside? If so, they’re doing a hell of a job of it. Sure, President Donald Moron is just a vicious sociopathic narcissist, but Moscow Mitch seems truly dedicated to his Russian overseers. Every place he could weaken the nation, the government, or even modern ethics, there’s the Republican Party leading the charge.
I got distracted. Here’s what I really wanted to show you. While I was idly browsing the election coverage last Tuesday, I ran into this discussion between Rachel Maddow and a weary-looking Laurie Garrett. Garrett, who covers science and health, is a best-selling author, a Pulitzer Prize winner, a Polk Award winner, and more. I know that all the Coronavirus coverage sounds the same, but after listening to this one, I rewound and watched it again. She really nails a lot of stuff. And she’s not cutting any slack: it’s going to get much worse.
The interview went on longer, but I can’t find a clip of the second half. Garrett talked about reconnaissance testing versus diagnostic testing, and how to use that to protect populations.
Here’s the distinction. Diagnostic testing is used to guide a sick person’s treatment so it prioritizes accuracy over volume or speed. By comparison, Reconnaissance testing measures infections in populations. For that, we trade accuracy for speed and volume. We need a reconnaissance test to be quick and cheap, and if it’s not totally accurate, that’s OK. With a quick-and-dirty test like that, you could do facility-level testing. Go to a hospital, jail nursing home, whatever, and just test everyone there, symptoms or not. Then you’ll find most of the hidden infections before they can spread the disease further. That’s especially critical for the patients, doctors, and staff, since they can travel between multiple facilities. Without that, you have no idea here the hidden infections are coming from. Otherwise, you have America today, where the sick mingle with us everywhere.
Unfortunately, we can’t do any of kind of testing. Even today (Thursday), it’s not just a moderate test shortage; we’re short by an order of magnitude. Nobody is even working on a COVID reconnaissance test.
As an aside, I still can’t figure out how the U.S. could have screwed up the testing this badly. The CDC says we’ve tested around 38,000 people for SARS-CoV2 in the United States as of this writing. Total. Yes, that’s the total number for the entire pandemic. America has around 327,000,000 people, so that’s what, 0.001%? We’re mostly testing to confirm a diagnosis, not to protect the population.
That’s fucking insane. The World Health Organization had accurate, established Coronavirus testing months ago. Couldn’t we ask them for their recipe? A month ago, South Korea was testing over 10,000 people a day. Look, Korean’s aren’t testing as frantically these days; I’m sure they have extra capacity. Can’t we buy some of their tests?
The CDC restricted testing to the CDC. For… reasons. I don’t know. At its very goddamn best, the CDC barely topped 100 tests a day. It’s not like we didn’t see the problem coming; we had a two-month headstart. Even now, we’re not doing the easy and trivial stuff like checking for fevers. Why can’t America do better? We’re confirming the world’s conclusion that the American empire has long-since passed.
I have no idea why the Republicans are screwing the pooch this badly, but it’s GOP genocide. American cities and states only get a trickle of COVID test kits, and even with that, we’re running out of the chemicals and materials to make more. And it’s slower to get results back, not faster.
Reliably, President Trump still treats the entire pandemic as a financial problem. The federal role in the health crisis? You’re on your own, he said. The British estimate is that this will roughly double the American deaths. Yeah. An additional one million people might die.
Dude! An epidemic is a health crisis. Trump sure missed that part, and none of the Republicans felt differently. Sure, the financial crash that follows a plague is important, but could you deal with the health part first? Please? We already know what we should be doing: testing, segregation, testing, ventilators, testing, ICU beds, testing, managing scarce resources (like masks and ventilators), and then a little more testing.
America isn’t doing what everyone knows we must if we wanted to limit the death rate. Instead, we let politicians point fingers, using the crisis for their own ends. We act on our worst impulses. We wait when we should act, then overreact after it’s too late. We’re either acting like fools, or it isn’t an act.
The pandemic is going to get much worse before it gets better. Deep down, I think we know that. And the response — the quarantines, the isolation, the economic shutdown — will be going on for months, not weeks. We know it will get much worse before it gets better, and yet we’re not preparing for that, either.
