The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back

The U.S. has never had enough coronavirus tests. Now a group of epidemiologists, economists, and dreamers is plotting a new strategy to defeat the virus, even before a vaccine is found.

 
Michael Mina is a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, where he studies the diagnostic testing of infectious diseases. He has watched, with disgust and disbelief, as the United States has struggled for months to obtain enough tests to fight the coronavirus. In January, he assured a newspaper reporter that he had “absolute faith” in the ability of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to contain the virus. By early March, that conviction was in crisis. “The incompetence has really exceeded what anyone would expect,” he told The New York Times. His astonishment has only intensified since.

Many Americans may understand that testing has failed in this country—that it has been inadequate, in one form or another, since February. What they may not understand is that it is failing, now. In each of the past two weeks, and for the first time since the pandemic began, the country performed fewer COVID-19 tests than it did in the week prior. The system is deteriorating.

Testing is a non-optional problem. Tests permit us to do the most basic task in disease control: Identify the sick, and separate them from the well. When tests are abundant, they can dispel the fear of contagion that has quieted public life. “The only thing that makes a difference in the economy is public health, and the only thing that makes a difference in public health is testing,” Simon Johnson, the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, told us. Optimistic timelines suggest that vaccines won’t be widely available, in the hundreds of millions of doses, until May or June. There will be a transition period in which doctors and health-care workers are vaccinated, but teachers, letter carriers, and police officers are not. We will need better testing then. But we need it now, too.

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Πηγή: www.defenseone.com