You could write an entire PhD on how the medical officers in this crisis have been used to make political questions appear to be ones about science. The idea we aren’t mass testing because of ‘epidemiology’ is nonsense ->
Germany has a healthcare system far more capable of treating mass cases of COVID-19, yet they have decided to do mass testing because it’s better to contain virus until vaccine available. It also means they need less draconian distancing measures ->
Where countries have had the capacity for mass testing they have used it. Where the capacity doesn’t exist, as in U.K., Italy, France etc, extreme social distancing has had to fill the gap. That’s the right policy *given* lack of capacity ->
But if we were to design a policy not constrained by pre-existing resources, can anyone argue we would choose not to mass test like the Germans ->
The most obvious proof of this is that our political leaders keep standing up and saying Britain is desperately trying to increase our testing capacity. So why are the CMOs flanking them still suggesting the reason we don’t test is because we don’t want to anyway? ->
Countries are clearly dealing with this crisis differently because of different starting points - in terms of resources, state capacity and poltical priorities. Having CMOs trying to elide that fact is bad for democracy and accountability. We should call it out.
