The greatest gift anyone could give would be to burn every last testing kit and to destroy every last laboratory apparatus capable of identifying this virus.
We cannot live like this. Exist, maybe. But not live.
We cannot live like this. Exist, maybe. But not live.
https://twitter.com/RMCunliffe/status/1471523049065402371
The human condition has, since the Neolithic revolution, required an accommodation with viruses. This is not simply a matter of health, it is a matter of our ability to tolerate the risks as well as the benefits of society in its widest sense.
(And, of course, a wider theme is the capture of this debate by scientists & medics who, even if they are speaking rationally & on the basis of good evidence and data and not flawed modelling (which they often are not) can speak only to one limited element of the wider picture.)
As ever with human solutions, the problem isn't the test in itself, but how it is used. The, er, 'radical' solution at the head of this thread would not need to be made had we - collectively - kept our heads and stuck to the planning (UK and WHO (Oct 2019))...
... and used testing sparingly - at very early stages and for people with viral symptoms (but not everyone) in hospital. But we couldn't.
The danger with a 'scientific' solution (which testing is only in the sense that it uses a mechanism routed in science, not that the solution itself has been considered logically and in accordance with precedent)...
is that it is so attractive to governments not for its efficacy and value (which cannot be known where their use of it has no precedent) but because it is clean, ahead of the curve and - most importantly - it makes them appear as though they are 'doing something'.
Never before have we been able to track a pandemic in this way. Did it do us any good? No. All it has done is embolden Canute's advisers - those who have grown ever more accustomed to state control as an answer to everything.
So, using the test data, they model. When their models turn out to be embarrassingly misplaced, they model again, taking minimal if any account of evidence. And they insist that any change in the dynamic of the virus is down that control, notwithstanding the classic viral trends.
What we do not do is count the cost. Mass testing enables and encourages mass frenzy. Frenzy, as it ever is, based on one harm. One risk.
And so we focus not on recovery, not on society in its widest sense but on this one virus.
And so we focus not on recovery, not on society in its widest sense but on this one virus.
Going back to our accommodation with viruses, we live and die with so many that society has had to adapt to being aware of them but not aware. Because if it were otherwise we would never leave our houses.
And we would never have been able to get over any previous respiratory pandemic - all of which must have left a 'tail' of more transmissible but milder variants - had we had the ability to track them indefinitely.
Human innovation will always create problems as well as solutions. And it is not the extent of our knowledge that matters, but how, why, when and in what context we use it.
@threadreaderapp Unroll
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
