printToday, April 17, Dr. Anthony Fauci finally explained what I EXPLAINED on April 9, a week ago, in the column, “Kung Flu Is A Killer, All Right, But So Are The Bureaucrats“:
“… COVID testing [is not] an amulet against the dreaded disease. It isn’t. All testing does is give an individual a snapshot in time of his COVID status. As soon as he drives out of the testing facility, a COVID-free person could become infected. Unless they engage in prevention, a single testing in time doesn’t in any way give individuals a clean bill of health.
Prevention protects people.”Testing is, however—at this stage of spread—helpful in giving medical researchers a grip on the symptomless-sick phenomenon, as well as an idea of how the disease is disseminated and distributed in the population.
Test and keep testing large enough representative samples, and you’ll get good prevalence data.
Maybe Anthony Fauci got a whiff of what his Italian colleagues in Lombardy were saying, for they preceded his belated, simple, overdue insight about the limits of testing:
“… some doctors at the Italian epicentre of the health crisis doubt that testing is their way out of confinement.”
“It is a nonsense,” Milan’s Polytechnic Institute professor Davide Manca said. “Conceptually, I am sceptical.”
The reason for Manca’s scepticism is plain to see in the math.
Milan’s Lombardy region has 10 million people and 11,142 officially registered COVID-19 deaths.
The economically strong area, the size of Belgium, has been under one of the world’s strictest lockdowns since early March.Yet Lombardy has been conducting just 6,500 tests daily over the past 10 days.
Manca estimates it would take more than five years for everyone in Lombardy to get tested just once.
“And you need people tested every 15 days for it to have any meaning,” Manca said in a phone interview. [My point here exactly.]”“Even if you raise that number 10 times, that would still take 200 days for one test. That’s six or seven months.”
“Manca said he still did not understand how the end of confinement would work.”
“Herd immunity is very difficult to achieve with COVID,” the professor said.
“You need 90-95 percent (of the population) to have COVID for immunity. That number is too high to reach.”
More candidly, in Italy, they are not talking dishonestly about “opening up the country.” They are talking about “coexisting with the coronavirus.”
Well, yours truly beat the good doctors to it on April 9, with “Kung Flu Is A Killer, All Right, But So Are The Bureaucrats.“
However, these medical heroes were busy saving lives. Bless them.