Great thread on a theme I've been hammering home in Congressional remarks and other forums this past week. People are *way* overestimating the willingness of 2 million Americans per day to get 6-inch nasal swabs sent up their nostrils to comply with a population testing regime.
And this 2 million number I'm using is not arbitrary. It's from a recent @HarvardEthics paper arguing that we should continue to lock down the economy until we deploy 2 million RT-PCR tests per day. ethics.harvard.edu/Covid-Roadmap
We should certainly test as many people as we can, with a special focus on high-risk populations (nursing homes, first responders, etc). But population-wide #COVID19 testing should not be the threshold for economic reopening. freopp.org/a-new-strategy…
What I'm seeing emerging as a middle ground on this front is temperature testing. Airlines and workplaces are deploying laser-based thermometers to test for passengers/workers with fever. Not nearly as reliable as RT-PCR, but also not nearly as intrusive. reuters.com/article/us-hea…
If saliva-based PCR tests become more scalable, that could help a lot.
