Back on my current hobby horse - the corona virus pandemic. I've been reading lots of various views around the world today (and the last few days) and there is a consensus forming as far as I can tell. Apart from the fact that most places aren't testing anywhere near as necessary, which I bleated about a couple of times already, the testing isn't helping anywhere near as much as it should.
OK, many countries are choosing their own way of testing, that's their prerogative in the absence of an international standard. Although the World Health Organisation has stated test, test and test again, and I don't think you could get a bigger nudge towards standardisation than that, it's a little light on direction.
Statisticians are now claiming that the methods used up to now are not suitable, and the arguments I'm hearing are compelling. We had, in the UK, the herd immunity argument that suggested that by voluntarily socially distancing people you could flatten the now famous curve and save the health care system from imploding, while getting the majority of relatively fit people exposed and presumably immune for the short haul. Completely isolating the vulnerable - and that means identifying them and ensuring they have a suitable support network for the twelve weeks that seems to be the common standard - while the rest of us get the disease, shrug it off in the main, treat the few that react badly sounds like a plan. However the numbers of deaths started to stack up, and the simple requests around social distancing to allow the herd immunity to develop in a controlled manner wasn't being followed by a significant number of people. If it helps, I followed it as far as my employer let me - cramming 22 students into classrooms designed for 18 at a push and rotating them from classroom to classroom every hour and a half didn't help.
The real problem, well two problems actually, are that many people didn't take the sensible measures to avoid mass contamination seriously and on top of that there wasn't any apparent plan to identify the vulnerable and support them. They're working on that now, but only because we're in lockdown and I'm hearing anecdotal reports of clearly vulnerable people not being on the database the government has compiled.
But testing as it stands is way below useful. As a minimum the NHS staff need to be tested - and by the way there are 1.2 million of them. Not all doctors and nurses, of course, but receptionists, cooks, cleaners, admin staff all working in close proximity and interacting with the front line guys and gals. And one test each is only a start as someone could be given the all-clear and pick up the virus fuelling up on the way home.
But the real challenge is knowing where the country is in relation to infection rates. The current process of only testing people who are showing signs of the illness is going to give a fairly high success rate, if determining someone is suffering from Covid 19 can be called success. It makes the hazard rate appear larger than it is, for one thing, and fails to tell us anything about how prevalent the disease is. An analogy I'm going to steal here is one I read online a day or so ago:
Suppose you wanted to know how popular Ford cars are in your area. One way is to pop over to your local Ford main dealer and ask everyone who walks through the door during a determined period of time, say one day, what make of car they drive. Many will say Ford, because many of us are creatures of habit. That is what the testing has been like in the UK, testing those exhibiting signs of CV. Alternatively pop over to your local Asda (Walmart for US readers) car park and count how many Fords there are and also how many non-Ford cars there are. Don't advertise it, choose a day at random, and you'll get a pretty good idea of how popular Ford cars are in your locality. There should be random testing in supermarkets - there would need to be legislation and the government would need to provide strong guarantees that the data will only be used for CV testing purposes as they would need to know who provided the sample. They would need to provide assurances that persons tested wouldn't have DNA information provided to the police, because that would provide people reasonable excuse to not participate.
That way we would have a better picture of the distribution of CV in society. It would have been useful to have known where it was before lockdown, but we can't go back there.
I for one wouldn't have any objections, and would happily share my DNA if it was for a useful purpose. In another world, maybe, I might be more circumspect - if you've read the Journeymen, and especially its sequel Journey Men II: Day of Reckoning you might wonder if the information was being used for other, nefarious reasons. But right now I'd like to think that sorting CV 19 out is our main priority.
You can access my books on Amazon using the links provided on this blog post. Stay safe and follow the rules, please.
No comments:
Post a Comment