We keep giving this virus more weeks of free time
It’s killing people, and I’m ‘effing angry about it
Angry enough to rant, so this is a bit of a rant. Content warning — there’s strong language here. This deserves blunt plain talk.
There are two reasons to damage economies with shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders.
The first is the obvious one — to get on top of this surging spike in cases and deaths, and keep it from overwhelming our hospitals and medical systems as much as possible. We’ve been reasonably successful in most places, so far. The changes in the rate of growth since we started strong isolating measures are stunningly obvious, and stunning good news.
The second, and at least as important, was to buy ourselves more time to prepare. This virus hasn’t gone away. It’s going to start taking off as we start relaxing these restrictions. We need to be able to track it, manage it, have some level of control over the course of the epidemic.
We know how to do that. Top of the list is testing. We have to know where this virus is, who has it, who doesn’t. We have to know when it starts increasing in a given location, so that we can institute individual quarantines, or local restrictions and shut down if necessary, or other controls. Without surveillance, tracing, testing, we’re blind.
To make testing effective, we need to know who has been contacted by someone who’s infected, as well as we possibly can. We need contact tracing, followed up with 100% available fast testing, so we can do as good a job as possible of isolating infectious people. As good a job as possible of letting uninfected people go back to their work and their lives.
And we need to prepare our health systems. Right now, today, doctors and nurses are entering rooms full of COVID aerosols, taking care of desperately ill patients, with week-old worn masks and improvised shields and gowns, because we still can’t get enough supplies to them.
We’ve been talking about needing these things since January.
None of it will stop this virus. This thing is with us forever, now. There’s still a high probability that it’ll infect half or more of us over the next year or two, infect 100 to 200 million people just in the US, and kill 1% of everyone it infects.
But if it hits hard and all at once, that number becomes much larger than 1%. If it rips through a community and overwhelms our ability to care for the sick, and kills 1 out of 25 people who get sick instead of 1 out of 100, and causes health care workers to die in larger numbers because they run out of gear and are overwhelmed by the exposure — the personal, community, and economic damage will be immensely larger.
We knew that there was a serious threat to the United States by late January. Even our fucknuts president points out that by January 29th it was serious enough to start shutting down travel, although he didn’t really do that like he claims he did. By late February we had confirmed community transmission and the first Covid-19 deaths. By the middle of March we were imposing quarantines, cases and deaths were growing exponentially. We’ve had 3 1/2 months now of knowing this was coming, and watching it start to break over us.
All along, we’ve known that the key to managing this, to trying to control it and keep life as normal as it can be, to keeping our economy moving as normally as it can, to keeping the death rate down, the key to all of that is testing and mechanisms for effectively using testing. Surveillance screening and testing. Contact tracing and testing. We know this. We’ve known it from the start.
If we’re not able to know where this virus is, who has it, who doesn’t, our only possible response is to shut everything down wholesale. This is what we were forced into six weeks ago. That, or let it take off and rage out of control again, and kill who it’s going to kill, and a fuck of a lot of additional people that we don’t have to let die if we don’t overwhelm our medical resources. While it’s at it, kill those medical resources, some of whom are people I know and love.
That’s the solution the President and the Republicans and conservatives are pushing now. We haven’t tried to solve the problems necessary to controlling it, so let’s give up, let it take off and kill who it will. It’s the solution of murderous incompetents who have thrown away the 3 1/2 fucking months they’ve had to try and start preparing to manage this thing. And now they’re willing to let us die for their incompetence.
It is now 3 1/2 months since we knew that there was a lethal epidemic afoot in the world. We haven’t even solved diagnostic testing, much less surveillance and contact tracing testing. We haven’t taken the problem seriously. Our President says that testing is not a national problem.
We’ve now been sitting in quarantine for 6 weeks and more, and we haven’t begun to fix the single most important fucking thing that we have to do to be able to relax these quarantines safely. In much of the country we’re about to declare defeat and abandon the quarantines, without bothering to do the things we know are necessary to not let this simply flare out of control again. We’re not even bothering to care about trying. It is inexcusable, and lethal.
