Re:I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC
by hcknwscommenter on Thursday June 18, 2020 @11:31AM
(#23564004)
The first corona patient is always going to be expensive. We had no testing infrastructure or really any best practices. We were unprepared in every way imaginable. Nowadays it doesn't have to be that way at all (and in fact it isn't that way). Watch videos of Korean drive through testing sites.
At this point in Europe we have private accredited labs doing tests for under 100€ on-site whenever there's an outbreak. Testing the entire US population once would cost ~30B$. Do it three times and spend 100B$ which would be incredible overtesting, and yet well below the other measures your congress has already passed in terms of cost.
Not enough labs, corona is too contagious to test only 3 or 4 times.
You're somehow assuming that doing things properly in the US requires a testing rate that's 1000x larger than everywhere else. I was just putting numbers to the absurd scale of testing everyone 3 times, which is far far beyond what is actually needed given examples of everywhere else.
They emphasize that each test is expensive, involving PPE for the collector, the lab assistants, reagents and machine time.
Then there's the question of accuracy and retesting to verify a positive result ...