Replies

We have no will or grit to fight it . We have weak leadership that

I will be a tad less dramatic in reply. 14 day isolation puts several dozen health care workers and first responders unable to care for you or your loved ones at each local facility. Now that there is greatly increased COVID-19 testing available, there is likely a high confidence level at +/- 5-7 days wherein a negative test and absence of symptoms equals no infection.

If health care workers can return to take care of you and your loved ones in 5-7 days rather than 14 days, the health care industry can continue to help others who are less fortunate, including who do test positive for SARS, pneumonia, or arrive via ambulance having a heart attack or GI bleed, or following a multi-trauma accident.

Have you read the medical professional texts in Italy ?
They are dramatic .
The health care systems have utterly crashed in N Italy .
They did not contain like us and let the
infected. Chinese vacationers roll in there for Mardi Gras festivals just like
Spring break here .
I have watched a leadership that ignored testing for 5 weeks while Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore set to strict screening protocols and containment.
They are being dragged kicking and screaming dealing with this crisis.
We need containment not Open airports fir the infected to roll in from Italy.
We need to slow down the case loads of the infection not
ignore it .
We don't want to be like Italy here.

I am a little dramatic now I am burned out on our lost opportunity to stop this in Late Jan like Taiwan and other smart countries did .
We cared more for Wall Street than public health and the stupidity of open airports has not stopped .
That press conference was sad .
My daughter said it was pathetic business men .

so far, we’ve had home quarantine, usually after a visit to a foreign country or to a hospital that sends you home because you’re not sick enough yet, military quarantine and hospital isolation. The first two options don’t require several dozen health care workers. The first two options lighten the load on the hospitals. If you throw quarantine out the window, you’ll have mobbed ERs like Wuhan, everybody running at the first sniffle or sneeze, demanding to be tested Now. Quarantine helps moderate the load on the hospitals.

“Five to seven days” confidence works if you know the day you get infected and that is an impossibility to be discovered only by hindsight. As for ‘available testing’, Calif alone has 36 million people. At two tests per person for nasal and throat that’s 72million tests, just to start, IF everyone could be swabbed on the same day. And then exactly 5 days later, another 72 million tests for that ‘confidence’. So I’m not understanding the logic of your argument in the least. Much less the flippant belief that there is ‘readily available testing’ right now for 360 million people.

Releasing folks after 7 days is a _very_ high risk gamble.

This virus defeats everyone who plays it safe, cuts corners, makes optimistic assumptions, and engages in half measures.

This particularly affects health care workers—they _must_ be protected so they can help others. There is no room for error there.

We _know_ that.

For those who don’t have the link, this is the best data source for US numbers:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18oVRrHj3c183mHmq3m89_163yuYltLNlOmPerQ18E8w/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true#

The CDC is not tracking it—but fortunately one citizen is doing their job for them.