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If Everything Fails, Anything Will Do
The latest insanity on the part of the Biden Administration is its promise to send out 500 million rapid tests with free delivery. (Our population is estimated to be 330 million.) This plan is so deeply disturbing and meaningless that I can’t find enough denigrating words to describe it. What in the world are they hoping to accomplish by sending out all these tests? Here’s part of the strategy:
A White House official said the administration would disclose more information about the type of tests it is purchasing after the procurement is finalized. The 500 million figure is based on what manufacturing capacity can handle, the official said.
The administration will continue using the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era national security mobilization law, to ensure that the U.S. is producing enough tests to meet soaring demand, according to the White House.
So the number of 500 million is a guess, based on manufacturing capacity, not on how many they think they will need.
Although we haven’t received the details of sending the tests, the process on its face is a foolish gesture meant to convince the American people that at least the federal government is doing something. The feds have already struck fear in the hearts of most Americans that the latest variant will likely kill them if they are not vaccinated. That this information defies the evidence to date is irrelevant. (The variant appears less deadly but more contagious, with almost no hospitalizations to date.) And to think that testing is somehow going to help us out of Covid is a bewildering goal. Maybe someone can help me understand what the powers-that-be are trying to accomplish. So, let’s walk through the parts of the process that raise so many questions.
First, I wonder how they will choose households to send the tests to? How will they determine how many people are in a household? How will they decide how many tests to send? Will they allow only one per household? One per person?
Second, will they tell people only to test themselves if they have symptoms? Or should everyone test themselves, since they could have Covid and be asymptomatic?
Since rapid tests can produce a false negative, will people expect they should take at least two of them? Will they complain to the government if they don’t get as many tests as they think they need?
Third, what should they do if the test comes out positive but they have no symptoms?
Testing positive for COVID-19 means you have pieces of the virus in your body. However, a positive test does not always tell you whether or not you could spread the virus to other people. The test that uses a method called reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) to look for genetic material of the virus can return a positive result even after you no longer have an active infection but still have inactive (dead) pieces of virus in your body.
Or if the test comes out positive, will they be expected to get a PCR test? Where will they get that test? If they are asymptomatic, are they going to be expected to quarantine themselves? If so, for how long?
What will be the costs of sending out these tests? Let’s say a rapid test costs $25 and $5 to mail, that’s $30 per test. At 550 million tests, that is over $16 billion dollars. Then again, that’s just a drop in the bucket when you’re talking about trillions of dollars. They will probably need to assume that people will want more than one test, too.
Of course, we should all be reassured that the government will manage this process:
‘It’s going to be all about the details: how it’s implemented, how these tests are distributed across the country, and most important, how quickly it could happen,’ said Mara Aspinall, the co-founder of the Biomedical Diagnostics program at Arizona State University and board member of rapid test-maker Orasure Technologies Inc. ‘The concept here is great, but we have to be faster than Omicron.’
Right.
I do not understand the reasons for this mass mailing. Unless people have symptoms, they should behave normally. If they get Covid and aren’t vaccinated, that’s their problem. Testing will not stop the spread of Covid. Will it convince some otherwise resistant people to get the vaccine? I doubt it. I can hear the alarm bells going off all over the country.
I think I was correct from the start:
If everything fails, anything will do.
Edit: The government will send out tests on request through its website (which is already crashing). There will not be a mass mailing.
Published in Healthcare
These tests are infallible, are they? No chance of false positives? The government decides who gets which test?
What an excellent opportunity to monkey with the COVID rates of states and municipalities deemed problematic by … umm … the kinds of people who deem states and municipalities problematic.
I suspect that somehow the tests will be used to further demonize the unvaccinated. I’m not sure how they’ll do it, but that’s just my lack of imagination!
My brother is a Dean at a major university. When they were discussing re-opening and testing early this year, they decided that asymptomatic testing was a bad idea. Because both the false positive and false negative rates are not zero, with a population of 35,000 students, you be telling x hundred people they don’t have it when they do and y hundred that they have it when they don’t.
Hey Gov. DeSantis …you haven’t done anything to stick a thumb in one of Joe’s eyes in – what, half an hour? Fifteen minutes anyway. Make it against the law to import self-administered COVID tests with a false positive rate of greater than 2%.
Doncha know they’re free?
Anyway, as Elvis once sang:
Good grief, Clavius. I’m glad to see some sanity showing up at a university.
Who knows how many dead people will receive them? Will they add that to their data? Thanks, OldPhil!
Gosh, sending out ballots willy-nilly worked to get him into the White House. And sending out dollars willy-nilly worked to keep the Treasury going. Sending out tests willy-nilly will surely work to keep the pandemic panic going through the 2024 election. Victory!
Sheesh, Marci, you’re starting to sound as cynical as I am! ;-) Yep, it always comes down to politics, doesn’t it?
Spread the Wealth Around! Which pharmaceutical manufacturer stands to make zillions? Check your congresscritter’s portfolio today!
They probably should rethink the objectives. Depending on what they’re trying to accomplish it might be entirely reasonable to make those mistakes.
It is true that more tests ensures more positive cases, and thus MAY encourage further overreaction/panic. HOWEVER, quick and easy testing will encourage those who have the virus to stay home and avoid spreading it; also, to get further testing and treatment if they do develop symptoms.
See The slow rollout of rapid tests and this horrible story about a scientist who created a rapid test, very early in the pandemic, only to have it blocked by the FDA.
I see what you’re saying, David. But wouldn’t it make more sense to find a way to make the tests more readily available to people who catch a virus? Sending out 500 million seems like overkill. I liked the article links, too. I’ve no doubt that politics has a hand in whatever testing has been approved. No doubt at all.
How would this work, logistically? They could pick one up at the store, at some risk of exposing people, of course, they could have someone, a family member or a friend, do it for them…or arrange for 1-day delivery from Amazon or some such. But if you want the tests used as frequently and quickly as possible in cases where infection *has* occurred, then it is best to minimize friction.
In any case, I think easily-available testing would have made the most difference in the early days of the pandemic, which is why my second link above is such a horrible story.
Just yesterday, I finished reading Gen LaGreca’s novel Noble Victory, which is about a doctor who had developed a treatment for severe neurological damage but is not allowed by the bureaucracy to use it…and then I saw the link to the testing/FDA story. This part:
Toward the end of October 2020, Bosch received a 48-hour ultimatum from the FDA for a response to a request for additional data. She had answers to the agency’s questions, but didn’t quite make that deadline.
By the time she replied, the FDA had already closed her application. “You call and they say, ‘Oh sorry, the clock started and we can’t stop it,’” she said.
…seemed like something right out of the novel.
Disclaimer: I am not a health care professional and the following should NOT be taken as health care advice. I’m just a layman trying to make sense of it all…
According to Business Insider the tests will be supplied by request, rather than being mass mailed like ballots.
The article states “Eight different brands of at-home rapid COVID tests are currently authorized for use by the Food & Drug Administration.” The brands are not listed.
It will be interesting to see which brands are offered.
Some “home testing” kits supply a Fedex shipping label so the swab can be shipped overnight to a lab. I believe these are the PCR tests which are reportedly more accurate. They may require your cell number so that the test results can be texted to you. There is a CDC list which characterizes them as “Home Collect” tests.
The Antigen tests are characterized as “Home Test”. That list includes the test I have (BinaxNow), which provides on site results in 15 minutes. It is currently available via retail, if you can find it. I ordered online from Walmart and have not yet used it.
Something to think about: The tests requiring the swab to be sent to the lab may be lost, or possibly be delayed if the lab is backlogged. Some product reviews about them have been indicated that can happen. Perhaps the tests are being offered in January so as to allow time for the Christmas shipping rush to wind down. And when the government offers free goodies, backlogs are likely.
Another thing is that if you send your swab to a lab you may be the last to know your test results. One can speculate that your health provider, local health department, or contact tracing specialist will be informed of positive results immediately.
The tests that provide on site results will maintain your privacy and enable you to decide what steps to take next.
Update: If this is a good idea why did it take 2 years to implement?
Related to your headline, government does many meaningless and/or terrible things just so politicians can say they “did something. ” No thinking through whether the action would be useful or helpful or even harmful – just “do something. “
So these tests will sample your DNA but will they test for covid as well?
You are so cynical. : )
That seems to be the way things have happened since day one of the Crisis, doesn’t it?
Sigh. Rapid tests.
We were driving up to our kids for Thanksgiving and broke the trip up into two days. When we left the hotel, we took a rapid test. My wife turned up positive. We immediately went to CVS and bought the same test: Negative. But it is one strike and you are out. So we drove back home.
The next week, we went to the clinic: Negative, negative.
Last year, when I got Covid, I had five tests in a week. here are the soccer results: 2 wins, 2 losses, 1 tie (inconclusive).
Rapid tests. Will save the day.
Sigh.
Michael Mina has been advocating this since early in the pandemic. But the FDA insists that it is only allowed to approve them as diagnostic devices rather than public health tools, thus dragging its feet on approvals and making them more expensive than they need to be. (Whether that is a self-made rule by the FDA, I don’t know.) Also, you had influential people like Michael Osterholm (now on Biden’s team) who were badmouthing these tests early on, refusing to see them as public health tools, possibly (my opinion) because he was so in-love with the idea of massive lock-downs that would make the restrictions we actually had look like they were instituted by people carrying Gadsen flags. I hear echoes of Osterholm’s arguments here on Ricochet from people who consider themselves free-market, freedom-loving conservatives. Yes, really.
I’ve been following Mina on Twitter and elsewhere, and he has very slowly gathering support. But it doesn’t helps when 99 out of a hundred newspaper articles get it wrong and (following Osterholm’s lead) say they are not as good as PCR tests. They, of course, are not as good for diagnostic purposes, but for purposes of keeping people from spreading the virus they are better (and more accurate).
The rapid antigen tests look for infectious particles. The PCR tests look for pieces of the RNA from the virus, whether or not those are just pieces of RNA leftover from an old infection and incapable of producing more viruses. The former is what tells you whether you are infectious and should avoid spreading your disease. The latter just tells you that you have or had covid, without distinguishing between have and had.
There are also people who are anti-anything. They are against vaccines, they are against masks, they are against testing, they are against quarantines, they are against everything, whether mandated or chosen freely. My suspicion is that they are witting or unwitting agents of the ChiComs. If the ChiComs know how to manufacture a new function in a virus, they certainly know how to manufacture untrue information and get ego-driven people who think they hate the ChiComs to spread it around to cause disruption.
In what order did you get those results?
If the order was, for example, negative, positive, positive, tie, negative, they could all have been accurate. If they were positive, negative, negative, positive, tie, it’s hard to imagine how they could have been accurate.
I bought a pair of tests from Walmart last month. It was $30 with free shipping.
In Europe, they have been flooding stores with cheap tests since summer. Everyone is expected to keep one at home in the medicine cabinet next to the Day-Quil. The USA would need billions of tests.
I went to Walgreens twice in the last week. 6 days ago they had 1000’s of self test kits stacked up by the pharmacy. 2 days ago they were all gone. Just empty shelves. Also a sign that said “Pfizer only. Moderna was out of stock.” There is a Omicron panic here in Austin, TX.
I don’t think it’s insane, but I do have some objections to the way the Biden Administration is going about it.
By having the government distribute them, it isn’t doing anything to let market forces bring the prices down so more people or institutions can buy their own and use them as they see fit. The main reason they cost $10 a test and up, instead of, say $3-$5 per test is because of unwise governmental obstacles. For a significant portion of a population of 330 million to take these tests frequently, a lot more than 500 million are needed, and I don’t see government distribution as being the best way for most people. I’m not against government making them available to people who can’t afford them, but I don’t think government purchases should overwhelm the market for them.
Also, I question whether governmental distribution is going to come without governmental monitoring of people.
I heard that today. So let’s imagine a govt website responding to requests. Along with the other problems you listed. I suspect it won’t be pretty.
I didn’t read the information carefully that I included. You are, of course, correct. Thanks for clarifying.
Right again. It’s not insane. It may be stupid but it’s not insane. Sorry for the hyperbole. Sometimes there is so much ineptitude that it’s frightening. I’ll try to be more objective.
“…deeply disturbing and meaningless…” pretty much sums up the entire Biden Adminisration.
This possibility could certainly be tried. We need to monitor the requirements they have for people receiving the tests.
Based on the trends in South Africa and other countries (SA is now just past peak for Omicron), by the time the test kits are built, distributed, and results collected, the Omicron variant will be declining. Meaning the gov’t is going to spend billions on something that a) isn’t needed, b) will have dubious data results, c) test results won’t matter once the variant is in decline, it’ll be over, and most importantly, d) this variant is, like all others, less lethal and more transmissible. That’s how they operate.
Deaths due to Omicron are almost nil. That’s why the news has flipped back to case counts, instead of deaths or hospitalizations. Because they’re not hospitalizing those infected with Omicron (except in severe cases), because symptoms are mild and no big interventions are needed.
So, to keep the fear up, they’ll only talk case counts from now on out, not hospitalizations, not deaths – because not enough fear can be generated with small numbers.
Also: The PCR tests are and have been suspect, because they’ve run them at cycles that are almost guaranteed to return a positive result (many more cycles than normal protocols, one might think it’s been done on purpose). The testing protocols have been disastrous in the last 2 years, and you can thank your gov’t for it.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new variant. Could these new tests be used with the next variant–or will we finally treat it like the flu?