The Coronavirus and How We Communicate

Everything is shut down but the one thing we continue to have plenty of is online communication. I think we should, for a while at least, forget the politics and use that ability to keep each other informed about their personal status and what's going on in their local community. Clearly, we want government agencies to do their best but it's up to the individual people to let each other know if they're having problems, give assistance and solutions that they've found for themselves. Americans have been through much worse than this, but these days we have the advantage of widespread communication to help. Let's use it positively.

That goes for the news media as well. They've got to be broadcasting helpful stuff, like who's being hurt financially and ways we can help, where we can get services, and especially virus testing. Testing is supposed to be coming online, but I still don't know the details of where to get it done and how to go about it. Pretty clearly the government leaders and agencies are going all out to do what is needed, so if the news media have something to say let it be in the way of positive suggestions and stop the blame game. There'll be plenty of time for that after the crisis is over.

 

 

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Government Regulation and Coronavirus Testing.

For those of you who call for the current administration to get out of the way and let the scientists handle the coronavirus problem, let's clarify things.

As I (and obviously many others far more knowledgeable than I) have been bitching about for some time, widespread testing to determine who has and doesn't have the virus is a big key to making appropriate public health measures and the delay of large-scale testing was frustrating.

South Korea, which first had the largest outbreak outside China, and was initially slow to respond, got smart and initiated drive through testing early on. They additionally took serious but voluntary "social distancing" actions such as we are now doing, and they are now experiencing a drop in cases and I hear are going back to work.

President Trump's administration over the past 2 weeks has been meeting with a large team of key private medical and non-medical businesses to put together a public private partnership to ramp up testing and we should see the effects of that this week. I watched the press conference about this yesterday and their work in addressing the logistical problems that were involved was truly impressive.

The genome for this virus was put out by the Chinese in early January. Once this was available the ability to devise an accurate test should have been a matter of days. But the CDC, staffed by the government scientists who critics contend we are to rely on for leadership, had regulations. They, not commercial labs who do this for a living, were to first devise the test, be its sole source and then test its validity. In fact, their initial test ran into big problems with false positives. It was not until 6 weeks after the genome was available, in late February, that the regulations were called off, to allow commercial and state labs to run with it.

So, this week we'll see how the plan to ramp up testing works out in actual practice. From what I saw at the press conference yesterday, I'd be surprised if it doesn't come off as planned. And, by the way, in response to those who scoffed at the idea of putting V.P. Pence in charge of this issue, I think he seems to be doing a masterful job.

 

 

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