Thread by @ASlavitt

NOW: We are back to where we were in March when we didn’t have enough tests.

Then we hadn’t prepared.
Now we have too many cases and no national approach.

What this means.

In many parts of the country, with 5 day backlogs to get results, the tests have little to no value in the 2 things we need tests most for. And the third is increasingly out of the question.

The first use helping us diagnose when we are sick means that at the first sign of a symptom, we must assume we have the virus. Stay home, isolate. Call or telemedicine with your doctor if you’re worried. Go the hospital if you’re having serious symptoms.

Second, this means we are losing our intelligence sampling capability. Our goal is to stay ahead of the virus. We blew that.

Per @youyanggu we have at least 200,000 new cases/day & no idea where they are or where they started.

This means we need to #StayHome much more.

Third, we have been hoping to scale up tests for use at colleges, sports & entrances to the workplace.

Tests should now be prioritized for essential workers, nursing homes & high risk communities.

The data will also start to look strange & could mislead us. It will lag reality so numbers are worse than they look until things change.

Percent positives will start to climb where we have shortages.

Labs, instead of raising prices as they have been doing, should now instead operate on strict priority guidelines to make sure the groups who need it get fast turnaround. Reporting by race & essential worker & illness level should be public.

We need to increase test capacity more. University labs should get rapid CLIA certification. Pooling samples and large scale saliva tests will help but are still some time off.

But if cases keep growing it is not possible to scale testing exponentially. So we as a society have a few choices to make.

-Going to bars or working to open schools
-Pushing employees back to work or WFH
-Fighting over masks vs wearing one
-Continuing to go state by state or pushing the fed government to take more responsibility

Every decision we make wrong costs time, jobs & people’s lives.