This is a huge one, at least in France. A friend recently tried to get tested because he was coughing heavily and had a fever. His doctor asked if he went to Italy or China recently, he said no, his doctor replied "Well then you don't have it." and that was the end of it.
You clearly have no idea what youre talking about. When something 100x less severe than the coronavirus happens, there is an ABSOLUTE AVALANCHE of people calling in on the full spectrum of sickness, from psychosomatic, to actually sick but with the wrong thing, to actually sick with the right thing but minor cases, to people that will actually die if not seen but cant make their case clear. The reality of the situation is that without instant, free, over-the-phone test results, this is a reasonable response from oversaturated medical systems.
The diagnostic is dead simple. Look at any health ministry of any country. It doesn't take a medical degree to understand that if you have flu-like symptoms, you need to be tested for the flu. And if you don't have any of the flu strains making the rounds, test for Coronavirus. You know, exactly what SK is able to do but somehow Europe isn't.
If my health care provider can try to sell me antibiotics despite a negative strep test, "just to be sure, because sometimes you get a false negative", then they're surely not ignorant of the phenomenon where tests are less than 100% accurate. (Perhaps they're just variably aware of it, depending on what the bean counters from the health care network's corporate office are telling them to do. But still.) And, if you take a "better safe than sorry" attitude regarding false negatives, then you're not too far off from realizing that not having the test is not that big of a deal, because you'd be telling people to stay home when they're sick in either case.
This is a viral illness. There is simply no treatment. You go home, rest and eventually get through it in most cases. If you have annoying symptoms, you try to alleviate those in the usual ways (as if it was any other cold/flu). If you get life-threatening symptomps, you call for help and they'll take you to the hospital (at least while they aren't completely collapsed).
What would you like the doctor to say or do here?
Specifically, I would like the doctor to say, "Stay the eff home and keep your germs to yourself, sickie."
More doctors doing this would also help put pressure on employers to change their policies. Maybe (dare I dream?) we can even get restaurants to start giving their employees sick leave, and encouraging them to use it, instead of requiring them to show up and germ up all the food on pain of losing their jobs.
Yet the doctor is one of many who are dismissing the likelihood of somebody having coronavirus just because they haven't been to Italy. So yes, stupid.
The amount of infected people calling in who havent traveled is _infinitecimal_. The doctor saying you're not infected is correct an OVERWHELMING amount of the time, probably >99% accuracy. Eventually, this wont be true, but then the doctor wont be telling everyone to go away because theyre not stupid.
Now, if you want to argue the merits of extreme overcaution and attempting things like 100% testing for a global pandemic mitigation plan, good for you. You have a lot of hurdles to overcome, some of which you named yourself, but none of them are the doctors fault. You are simply wrong.
Now the infected population is very small, so if too many non infected people is testes, the false positives would be much bigger than the true positives. So you would get a lot of people unnecessary in the hospital while they have a normal cold or flu.
Anyway, if the symptoms of a normal cold or flu are so bad that deserve hospitalization, the doctor will send you to the hospital even if it is not covid19.
[If you are in a risk group, get the flu vaccine. It will not protect you from covid19, but you definitively don't want to catch a bad flu while the hospital if full of covid19 patients.]
I'm in Catalonia, Spain.
When my son got a cold, I also preferred to get him tested, but couldn't. Soon it became pretty obvious it was just a cold, but still, without a negative test for him, I'm not allowed to come to the office.
It's pretty clear that it's spreading faster than they can keep track of by merely tracking who you had contact with. I can understand they don't want to waste time or resources on people who obviously have a simple cold, but I'd rather they did test people who report flu cases.
Or is it encouraging individuals to start making more of a grassroots effort to effect change for their own sakes, rather than sitting around waiting for the people with little to gain and much to lose in enacting more human policies to suddenly have a change of heart?
Which means that change inevitably has to start with individuals. Trying to insist that it's corporations' and governments' job to make the first move is only useful in situations where assigning blame is more important than dealing with the problem.
Perhaps related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
That said, in the US with its tradition of completely ignoring all needs of employees, there are a lot of people for who this advice would amount to quitting their job, and it's pretty obvious a lot of people can't afford that.
Employers should definitely do their part by encouraging people to work from home, and paying sick people to stay home so they don't infect their co-workers. I honestly don't understand what kind of employers would want an epidemic to spread in their offices.
Reading about American employers is baffling compared to my own. Everybody is encouraged to work from home. In face, every week half of the company is required to work from home. If anyone in your household has a cold, you have to work from home for two weeks.
It may be a slight overreaction, but that's vastly better than just ignoring the problem. From everything I hear, I seriously fear COVID-19 is going to wreak havoc in the US. They seem to have fine-tuned their country to be as vulnerable as possible to this: Many people with no or poor health insurance, no sick days, who are very easy to fire, will feel forced to go to work no matter how sick they are. Then there's Trump firing the pandemic crisis team, a dramatic shortage of tests, and nobody seems to be in charge over this thing, or even know anything at all.
- Employers don't allow telecommuting.
- Employers with draconian sick leave policies.
- No paid sick leave for the majority of jobs (and or strict limits).
- Limited access to testing to know if you have Covid-19 (Vs. a common cold). Which is significant with e.g. Walmarts new policies which ONLY allow Covid-19 paid sick leave.
Ultimately we set up a system where most people lose by default, then we critique those people for their personal failings without a hint of irony.