Originally posted in the Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine.
The Test We Need To Pass
By Richard Morchoe
What is to be done? These words were part of the title to a pamphlet written by Lenin in 1902. The question was, for him, about political struggle. The same question, for us, is about life itself.
For a good part of this year, the nations of the world have been dealing with a pandemic due to the Covid-19 virus. No one I know has not been affected and your columnist will go out on a limb and guess that anyone who reads this has seen their lives changed as well.
Life seems to be opening up. First, in a manner unplanned, as happened in the wake of the death of George Floyd and second, in the phased re-openings such as ours here in Massachusetts. As we follow the steps outlined in the protocols we might get back to something approximating normal life, or what the governor has called the "new normal." Maybe the new abnormal would be a better term.
Your columnist has been keeping an excel spreadsheet of the daily increase in cases and deaths recorded in localities where he has friends and relatives. Excel, being flexible enough, more states and countries were added if there seemed to be something interesting happening.
Massachusetts is doing much better than it had been early on with the soldier’s home and nursing home deaths. In this, we are similar to our sister state bordering to the west. Indeed, if the states were for profit organizations with independent boards of directors, the chief executives would have been removed as the deaths of the elderly were reported.
Still, give Charlie his due, we have improved, but we are still registering new cases in the hundreds most days and deaths in double digits. Clearly, the war is not over.
New York state and city started out on the same poor trajectory we did, but, like us have improved. The city, even with the riots and continuous protests, is doing well.
Seattle, Washington, which had been doing okay, has lost it. This seems to have occurred along with the rise and fall of CHAZ or was it CHOP. You can't tell the players without a scorecard.
One southern state was kept tabs on. Georgia opened up full of hope, and crashed. The headlines from most of the other states from below the Mason-Dixon are similar. With summer, we were supposed to see a lessening of the severity of the plague.
Asking around, it was explained to me that summer in the south is no longer summer, but air conditioning season. Whereas when the weather warms up here, we go outside, down south, when it gets really, really hot, they go from air-conditioned house to climate-controlled car to air-conditioned work place. They are not soaking up as much vitamin D as we are.
Foreign countries were doing great until they weren't. Czechia masked up early on via citizen initiative and it worked well. They seem to have loosened up and it shows.
Uruguay, known for being the most un-corrupt South American country, almost completely ended Covid-19, but the virus is making a comeback in the lower hemispheric winter as it is in the formerly triumphant Australia.
New Zealand declared the plague over, yet sees a case a day diagnosed, but no deaths. Singapore, a nation almost predicated on air conditioning, has new cases in the hundreds daily, but also no deaths, usually.
Is there any country that can be considered an unmitigated success? Coming closest might be Taiwan. Across a strait from China, it could have been a disaster, but they learned from the SARS scare of 2003 and a plan was in place.
They masked early, restricted entry to the country and enforced the rules. Also, there has been an emphasis on testing.
Taiwan has done this without the World Health Organization. It is not a member of the WHO because of China. They have had a grand total of 451 cases and seven deaths in a country of just under 24 million. Not a behemoth but neither is it a postage stamp. It is an effort we should be jealous of.
Certainly, there is much to learn from other countries that have confronted Covid-19, even if there is only so much that can happen in our somewhat ungainly federal system.
By nature, we are optimistic on Long Hill, but looking at the daily case figures for our state, there is reason to fear a surge later in the year.
So, there is the question we asked at the beginning, what is to be done?
Testing!
The government and much of the media are putting an emphasis on a vaccine, but that is not at all certain.
So, why should one be enthusiastic about testing.
Some prestigious institutions have lined up behind it for good reasons. Harvard will allow students back on campus, but will test for the virus every three days. A test you don't have to study for, what's not to like? Princeton will limit the number on campus but test them regularly. Other top-flight schools will be practicing similar regimens.
These choice colleges know that if you are going to train up the next elite, it's important to keep them alive to protect the brand.
Testing is not widespread enough yet, nor is the turnaround fast enough. Right now, the capacity is sorely lagging. Still, it is easier to improve testing than come up with a vaccine. So more and faster testing units need to be made and an infrastructure to test often and evaluate quickly must be put in place.
When someone wants to highlight the seriousness of a condition they might compare it to another condition. Jimmy Carter referred to the energy crisis of the 70s as the moral equivalent of war. Others might say a crisis calls for a Manhattan Project on the scale of the crash program that led to the atomic bomb. If ever there was a time that called for such a program this is it. It should not be near the degree of difficulty as the development of nuclear weapons.
One method of getting there has been suggested by Nobel economist Paul Romer and two congressmen, one from each party (From The Hill, June 15, 2020). Their solution is to offer a federal prize. There are precedents as federal prizes have been used before to solve problems. This is so crucial because as the authors write:
"Testing allows us to pinpoint those who are infected and must isolate, while lifting lockdown for those who are uncompromised. Another prize competition focused on scaling up capacity to millions of tests per day will accelerate our return and establish a critical advantage when, inevitably, we face a pandemic like this again."
Enormous sums have been spent in this emergency, most of it not on the average citizen. Attaining testing capacity is crucial. We should be happy to reward those who succeed rather than those who fail as we have been.
Romer and his two colleagues are not alone. The Rockefeller Foundation has released the National Covid-19 Testing & Tracing Action Plan which has the same goal as Romer and associates. The Foundation will invest $50 Billion. Its president was blunt, "The only alternative is more large-scale lockdowns."
Up on Long Hill, we cannot be sure we are correct, but following what appears the most logical course when we look at the numbers, testing seems the best choice.
What seems also to follow is that going down a path of fits and starts with partial re-openings and re-closings for the next decade will not work unless we get lucky with the vaxx.
