>>11527199>>115272106) The US is still not doing enough testing
It’s worth remembering why hundreds of millions in the US are under stay-at-home orders, with infection rates soaring across the country.
“The facts remain that we wasted a lot of time in terms of ramping up testing,” Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, says. The US could have spent a lot more time diagnosing and isolating the sick, and tracing their contacts, which could have prevented at least some of the spread.
Testing in an outbreak provides two functions. One is to diagnose those who are sick. The other is surveillance: to see where the virus may be lurking, especially in cases where symptoms are mild or don’t manifest at all. The US has barely had enough testing capacity to test the sickest, let alone the capacity to do surveillance. Many doctors are telling patients with milder symptoms to just stay home and not get tested.
The US has caught up to some of the early stumbles. The Atlantic, which has been aggressively tracking the testing situation across the country, reports that around 104,000 people are being tested a day. But “testing backlogs have ballooned, slowing efficient patient care and delivering a heavily lagged view of the outbreak to decision makers,” the Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal write.
7) Lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders are not an overreaction
Three out of four Americans are now under some sort of lockdown or shelter-in-place order from their local authorities. For many of them, the best thing they can do right now is just be patient.
There may be a lag of a few weeks before these difficult measures are reflected in new case and death data.
Right now, many people are still getting sick and requiring hospitalization, who were infected before these orders went into effect. The virus can incubate for up to 14 days before symptoms appear, and then it can be several more days before severe illness sets in.
