Looking for a Magic Answer on COVID-19 Testing is Causing Delay
But we need tests now. And in many places the nasal swab tests infrastructure was operating at less than full capacity as of last month. Sometimes it's people at the far end, processing the collected swab samples, who are holding up testing. Governors talk periodically of clearing testing "backlogs", indicating test lab processors are short on staff to handle the sudden influx of tests. Congresspeople talk of need for a "testing breakthrough". How about funding nasal swab tests and increasing staff for such backlog clearing? Would that require funding for private corporations like Labcorps and Quest diagnostics to hire and train temporary staff?
Repeatedly we hear cries for a "national strategy on testing" to speed up the containment of COVID-19. What would such a strategy look like? Would this be a government-funded national network of swab collection stations and processing labs?
Just fund the swab collection tests. Use the DPA to order manufacturing of extra test kit reagents, extra vials and extra swabs. Make it clear these workers will be temporary. It's much less expensive to do this than to let the economy slog past a recession into a depression.
---------------------------
Further Reading:
"NIH Director Francis Collins told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee that government and private industry have launched a $2.5 billion, taxpayer-funded effort to develop, manufacture and distribute technology capable of accurately testing millions of people a week by the end of the summer or the fall, before the annual flu season." kentucky.com
A U.S. map, color-coded by county, showing which counties showed a rise in COVID cases, and which had a fall in cases. nationalgeographic.com
This work by AJ Fish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
