COVID Testing Theater

It seems that we as a nation and our government keep looking for the "magic pill" to get us out of the pandemic. Certainly, the promise of vaccines has not worked out how we liked due to:

1. Our nation's own inability to vaccinate everyone due to anti-vax sentiments that widely prevail
2. The world is not vaccinated, so that provides a breeding ground for new variants to emerge

Which leads us to the "next solution" that is receiving great attention these days with 500M rapid home test kits being ordered. Are test kits perfect? Do they sometimes provide false positives? Do they sometimes not pick up an infection? It is no to the first question and yes to the second two. Remember, you have average people administering these tests in their home environment. Administration of the test might not include reading the instructions—especially for men.

Sometimes we have government programs constructed by government to make us feel better about what is being done. While I believe in the airport screening process, it has been called Homeland Security Theater. Making us feel safer and would be assailants think twice about trying something.

The big push to pump out 500M test kits feels a bit theater like. Here's the next best thing we can do.

Everything I've read says we need a strong public health system in place; vaccinations for everyone; testing widely available; social distancing and the wearing of masks. If everyone did the above, worldwide, maybe then we could conquer the virus. Until then, we will evidently scrape along as we have been doing for the last year until the virus is just endemic.

Lastly, be aware of false information being passed around on the Internet about tests and testing. This from the New York Times:

"Misinformation about Covid-19 tests has spiked across social media in recent weeks, researchers say, as coronavirus cases have surged again worldwide because of the highly infectious Omicron variant.

The burst of misinformation threatens to further stymie public efforts to keep the health crisis under control. Previous spikes in pandemic-related falsehoods focused on the vaccines, masks and the severity of the virus. The falsehoods help undermine best practices for controlling the spread of the coronavirus, health experts say, noting that misinformation remains a key factor in vaccine hesitancy.

The categories include falsehoods that P.C.R. tests don’t work; that the counts for flu and Covid-19 cases have been combined; that P.C.R. tests are vaccines in disguise; and that at-home rapid tests have a predetermined result or are unreliable because different liquids can turn them positive.

These themes jumped into the thousands of mentions in the last three months of 2021, compared with just a few dozen in the same time period in 2020, according to Zignal Labs, which tracks mentions on social media, on cable television and in print and online outlets."