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Originally Posted by Seedless00
The reason testing is important is because it has a causative impact on lowering the reproduction of the virus. If you can get results within 24 - 48 hours, you can engage in widespread contact tracing, which will inherently lowering the reproduction of the virus.
Yeah, contract tracing (which requires testing) is the #1 way to beat the virus. Solid contact tracing and isolation teams are the reason for all successes in Europe. For example, here is Croatia. You can see where they opened up and let hordes of tourists in after eradicating the virus from their country. Everything is packed with tourists from all over the world and has been for two months, and bars, socializing etc is like normal. Yet they're containing this brilliantly thanks to local teams that know and vigorously trace and quarantine contacts of every single case that comes to their attention. This is their daily new case count:
In America there's no possibility of this kind of central control and forced compliance. In the US, contact tracing effectiveness in a region depends entirely on whichever bureacratic cuck is in charge, and the cuck chain goes 2-5 layers deep a lot of the time (state -> county -> mayor -> local health commissioner -> local teams) with their own prerogatives and chains of command and interest levels in actually doing something and competence levels in making that happen. Local US health departments are procedural bureaucratic in many areas and not nimble. The NYT says:
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And in New York City’s tracing program, workers complained of crippling communication and training problems.
Contact tracing, a cornerstone of the public health arsenal to tamp down the coronavirus across the world, has largely failed in the United States; the virus’s pervasiveness and major lags in testing have rendered the system almost pointless. In some regions, large swaths of the population have refused to participate or cannot even be located, further hampering health care workers.
Democrat NY for example has 35% compliance with contact tracing (I mention Democrat and NY to show the broadness of this problem; it's not about leadership or politics or even having seen it first hand as NY did - it's a far deeper problem rooted in the attitudes of the US populace itself, which I predicted months ago and the dickheads like Cuepee and WorldBoFree fail to understand).
This decentralization into thousands of local health areas and administrations, an unruly populace, laws and customs that make forced quarantine hard, low social responsibility and cohesion, make it impossible to have the same impact as Europe, but it's such a powerful tool that can take R below 1 by itself when done well, and any bit helps slow the spread, so it should definitely be tried as much as possible. And is being tried - Trump and the CDC are pushing like crazy to improve contact tracing efforts and teams everywhere, but the health administrations are so fractured and many local areas so incompetent or uninterested that there's only so much that a top down effort can do. Even with the best teams you can't contact trace effectively when populations are so selfish and short sighted and full of bravado and stupidity that less than half of them even respond to tracing efforts because they don't want to be hampered and think they're fine.
Last edited by ToothSayer; 08-07-2020 at 07:02 PM.