Reopening the economy is facing nothing but excuse after excuse from the people who seem perfectly at ease letting the coronavirus shutdown go on indefinitely.
Remember when we were told that some ungodly number of testing capacity was needed to be reached before we might even start thinking about returning to somewhat normal business? Well, now testing is apparently just a precaution that’s nice to have available but doesn’t really do much for us, after all.
Vice President Mike Pence drew criticism this week after he showed up in Minnesota at the Mayo Clinic on Tuesday without wearing the advised face mask. His excuse was that he had just been tested for the coronavirus, and the result was negative.
Ah-ha! But doesn’t he know that the very second after taking that test he could have been infected and not know it?!
That’s the point CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota made Wednesday. The negative result, she said, is “just a snapshot in time at that moment, at that hour that you were negative. In the next 24 hours, you may have become positive, so even that logic is faulty.”
Alright, then what, exactly, are we clamoring for widespread testing for if they provide nothing more than a “snapshot”?
It apparently has to be said over and over that we are not going to stop the virus from spreading. We can mitigate the national recovery, and we can individually do our best to wash our hands, keep our distance, and wear masks (for a time). But in the end, we have no choice but to develop effective antiviral medications, hopefully, engineer a vaccine, and set ourselves up for a collective resistance to the new virus.
All of this talk about testing to the infinity and stopping the spread 100% is never going to happen, and yet, that’s what a lot of people seem to expect before anything can gradually reopen.
Brown University President Christina Paxson wrote this week in the New York Times that in order to open up university and college campuses, we need to, among other things, conduct limitless testing of students. “Regular testing is the only way to prevent the disease from spreading silently through dormitories and classrooms,” she said.
Probably not. In fact, there’s almost certainly no way to prevent the disease from spreading, as evidence suggests that the vast majority of people who test positive have picked up the virus without ever even knowing it.
Disease expert Michael Osterholm wrote in the New York Times that the goal for testing “is to identify people who might spread the virus and isolate them, and to allow anyone protected from reinfection to resume an active social and professional life.”
That sounds reasonable, and we could be doing that right this very moment if there were enough tests to do such a thing — but there isn’t. There is no test for any contagion that is produced on that scale.
In the same paper, though, two scientists from Yale wrote that “If we can’t prevent the spread of Covid-19, the economy will not be able to reopen.”
So, what do we do? Following this logic, nothing. There would literally be no measure we can take to start up again, outside of hoping that we magically eliminate the virus altogether.
But that’s not an option, so long as we’re working under the presumption that we’d still like to have a country.
Testing has a purpose, and the more tests there are, the better. But let’s stop acting like they’re going to stop the inevitable.
