Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ's left nut
How?
350 million people spread out throughout the country and no built in immunity to speak of. Let's say you can test 10 million people/day - still gonna take more than 30 days to get through wave 1.
And you'll STILL need to re-test people because again, no built in immunity so many of those people can/still WILL acquire it. Especially when we also have little control of our borders and few other nations will have any ability to maintain similar testing protocols.
Which is why focusing on timelines matters - this can't go on in perpetuity. You have to build in a buffer population to allow the mass testing protocols to matter. Otherwise it's just circular, you just keep going round and round and round and re-testing people to see if they've acquired it yet, not if they'll acquire it at all. And if they don't have antibody's built up, is your answer still to just keep them locked up?
From day 1 this has been about coming up with the best of bad options. And the controlled burn option is certainly the hardest, but it's also the only one that will actually yield an outcome (apart from the 'hunker down and hope for rain' approach, which will inevitably fail anyway, IMO).
I just don't see a way practically effectuate a mass-testing sort of approach.
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Bill Gates suggested that we might be able to move to a mail-in test kind of like when you do a cheek swab for ancestry DNA tests and the like. Scale is still an issue, but that'd move it forward much more quickly.