A Smarter Approach to the Coronavirus Pandemic?

I don’t understand the focus on coronavirus testing, spending billions of financial and human cost that could more wisely be spent or returned to the taxpayer, merely to discover prevalence — We know it’s prevalent.

Testing’s ostensible additional purpose, as argued by Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA), is to quarantine the infected. He’s calling for mass testing — 60,000 to 80,000 a day and hiring and training 10,000 “trackers” to search out everyone the millions of of infected people have been in contact with. These trackers will be scouting in every imaginable locale, from Calexico to Modesto, Los Angeles to Los Banos, San Francisco to Crescent City. And if the trackers find even half of the millions infected, do you keep them all in quarantine? How do you enforce it? The vast majority already self-quarantine and those foolish and selfish enough not to will be impractical to police. And the tests yield many false positives, which quarantine and worry people unnecessarily. The tests also yield many false negatives, which allow carriers to sally around infecting others. Today, the New York Times summarized the problem in an article’s title, Antibody Tests: Can You Trust the Results? It went on to report that even the best of the 14 tests reviewed had flaws. Then there’s problem that we don’t know how positive is positive enough to convey serious disease, and in the case of the antibody test, how much immunity that confers and for how long. And you could test negative today and test positive tomorrow! Do we test millions of people day in and day out, even every month in and month out?! Even in the low, low probability that all of these concerns are overblown, we’d save a relatively few lives, mainly old people with severe underlying conditions so they can live a little longer, often in a nursing home, only soon to be beset by the death-causing sequelae of one of their underlying conditions, a more horrific disease such as diabetes amputations and blindness, crushing heart attack, or vegetating stroke.

Almost as foolish is spending so many billions more on treatment and on research to find better treatment. Again, it’s mainly people with underlying conditions so severe that even putting them on ventilators and state-of-the-art drug cocktails isn’t working for 88 percent of them — they died. Huge cost and major diversion of medical resources from people with greater potential to benefit.

And then there’s handing out of “stimulus” checks — Everyone has their hand out knowing that there’s minimal checking. Hey, until social shaming, even Harvard and Stanford, with their $40+-billion endowments had their hands out.

How ‘s all this going to get paid for? Borrowing and printing more money, which at minimum, makes everyone’s dollars worth less. That $1,200 per person ends up being trivial in real dollars. Our government is robbing Peter to pay Peter. Perhaps worse, we’re increasing our already $25 trillion(!) debt, over a trillion to the Chinese! That not only increases the cost of future taxpayer-paid debt service it’s an increasingly existential threat to the U.S.

Everyone knows you should stay six feet away and wear a mask in a store. We don’t need more a fortune more of taxpayer dollars to promulgate the universally known. Yes, in low-compliance areas, community leaders should encourage residents to follow those guidelines. (So sad that in some areas, people need that.)

I would not shut down the economy — the short and long-term sequelae are too great: small businesses going out of business, people unable to pay rent, people’s life savings decimated in the stock market decline, countless people suffering the mental, physical, and relational costs of isolation.

The only major area the government should be involved is to fund undercapitalized efforts to create a vaccine. Big Pharma has plenty of money. The government should support only startups with smart research avenues but little cash.

That’s what I think is the wisest plan. Anyone want to argue with me? Agree with me?

I read this aloud on YouTube.

You can reach Dr. Marty Nemko at mnemko@comcast.net