Re:Bill Gates slams 'shocking' U.S. response to Covid-19 pan...
by scsilver on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @11:06AM
(#24482006)
Im currently in grand teton national park and need to get a test before seeing my parents. This area that has 5+ million visitors a summer has about 3 covid tedting sites in an 2-3 hour drive. The main hospital needs a referal to give you s test. Any referals from out of the area will have their tests sent to another site, results are expected in 5-7 buisness days. When asked how much it would cost, they said they have no idea, they will bill the insurance. We have decided not to take this test and wait till we are in a major city and get the 15 minute test. Naturally, they have plenty of open appointments to administer the test. Our healthcare is completely broken. These national parks are intersections of people from all over the US and one of the most important places to have rapid testing and its just completely unavailable.
Re:Bill Gates slams 'shocking' U.S. response to Covid-19 pan...
by lumberingjack on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @11:54AM
(#24482708)
Imagine a virus so bad you got to get tested in order to know if you have it or not. You made the choice to go to the park nobody forced you to go there you're going to have to sacrifice some stuff if you want to be 100% safe but trust me buddy CDC websites says 003% that anything is going to happen
Re:Bill Gates slams 'shocking' U.S. response to Covid-19 pan...
by scsilver on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @04:35PM
(#24497501)
Thankfully, I'm a young and healthy adult and wish to do my part to continue living my life while doing due diligence to protect more susceptible people around me. And if you want to look at it in a fiscally conservative way, prevention of spread is cheaper than treating those it may have spread to.
Re:Bill Gates slams 'shocking' U.S. response to Covid-19 pan...
by toast0 on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @11:41AM
(#24482526)
> In reality, your doctor would simply stop testing for Coronavirus and instead refer you to a LabCorp collection center, where they could keep you waiting in line until they had enough testing capacity to take your sample and start the 24-hour clock. Everyone loses.
This kind of sounds like a semi-win. Eliminate the middle man between the patient and the lab. Provide visible backpressure by refusing to accept requests that can't be serviced in a timely fashion, allowing those requests that are serviced to be timely.
It doesn't help the problem of more demand for tests than supply of testing (or at least, not directly). But it's better to have all (or substantially all) results in 24 hours, than to have all results in a pipeline for a week.
Also, maybe start at 48 hours, if 24 hours is too restrictive.
Re:Bill Gates slams 'shocking' U.S. response to Covid-19 pan...
by RhysU on Tuesday September 15, 2020 @12:38PM
(#24483266)
Except now you have one appointment to order the test and one appointment to take the test and possibly another appointment to read the results. A 2x to 3x process drag during which the patient is not being productive at their day job.
This is especially true for providers who aren't running the tests in-house. If your doctor takes a test and sends it out to an external lab like LabCorp, who is responsible if the complete process takes more than 24 hours?
In reality, your doctor would simply stop testing for Coronavirus and instead refer you to a LabCorp collection center, where they could keep you waiting in line until they had enough testing capacity to take your sample and start the 24-hour clock. Everyone loses.
Not to mention all of effort required to retool billing and accounting systems to account for time-based costing. This alone would drive the cost of testing upward by huge amounts. Or more realistically, providers would simply not offer tests unless patients paid in cash to avoid this mess.
This is a great example of how regulation can end up making the situation worse, despite good intentions.