The new thing the national media want us to be angry about is that President Trump is minimizing the importance of coronavirus testing.
They all act as if a positive or negative result does anything more than tell us, “Yup, you’ve got it.” Or, “Nope, you don’t have it yet!”
I say “yet” because it seems like only a matter of time before the majority of the population contracts the virus, though early indications are that most of us won’t even realize it when we do.
The president surely knows that, and on Thursday at the White House, after it was reported that one of his assistants was found to be positive, he called testing “somewhat overrated.”
True! We’re dealing with a highly contagious virus, which means a test only shows that at the very moment it was administered, a person was either negative or positive. It works a little better for high-level government officials because they can get the test back more rapidly, but that’s not the case for the rest of us. (And it’s not an elitist thing for government officials to get tested more frequently no more than it’s elitist for the president to get Secret Service for life or to ride Air Force One for official business while the rest of us sit in front of the bathroom on Delta.)
Just as when a person goes to get blood tests for a myriad of illnesses or viruses, it can take days to get the results back, and in that time, they might have been exposed to any number of infectious diseases.
CNN was even acknowledging this last month when anchor Alisyn Camerota described test results as “just a snapshot in time at that moment, at that hour that you were negative.” She rightfully noted, “In the next 24 hours, you may have become positive.”
We are past the point of containing the virus or ensuring that it stops spreading. The only thing we can continue doing is help in slowing it down so that our healthcare providers aren’t overwhelmed and hope that scientists take on demonic speed in producing effective anti-viral medications and vaccines.
The one thing testing might now be useful for is detecting people who show none of the standard symptoms of the virus and who might then go unwittingly spread it if not told that they should quarantine for a few days. That’s probably not going to happen due to an ongoing shortage of tests and swabs to cover a country of 330 million people, but, as fate would have it, there’s probably an even more efficient way of doing things.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that scientists were able to examine the sewage in cities and districts across the country to see whether any given area looks like it may be having an outbreak. It’s possible because the virus appears to shed from infected people in large amounts. When that’s detected in a given place, local authorities, perhaps with help from the federal government, can then take action.
The call for mass testing on a national scale is not only unrealistic, but it’s almost useless. Trump is right. It’s somewhat overrated.
