anciendaze
Senior Member (Voting Rights)
I think the important point is that the approach described, not testing asymptomatic people who may be carriers, does not identify the routes by which the infection spreads. This is classic "community spread" which defeats contact tracing. In Florida we went through a previous dispute about testing asymptomatic workers in long-term care facilities. Nationally, the cost of testing twice a week was estimated at $25 billion. This was rejected as too expensive. We ultimately found many thousands of workers in long-term care who were infected.
The reason for testing so often is to catch carriers before they can infect others. A friend who is sending a daughter to an exclusive university this year found that they promised to test two or three times a week to prevent spread among healthy students. Cost was not a barrier for them. They also have plans to isolate infected students.
Our governor had previously modified an executive order about workers in restaurants to say they could return to work without testing if they were asymptomatic. Prior to this it required two negative tests. This was aimed at reducing the cost burden on restaurants. It completely ignored the possibility those with mild symptoms would lie in order to keep working for financial reasons. This state is not offering a great deal of financial support for workers who self-isolate, and our unemployment system has been a disaster.
What is central to this idea of encouraging community spread is that many cases will not be identified and will not appear in statistics. I've tried to model the epidemic and run into discrepancies that just don't make sense. What I can say with confidence is that there is a strong correlation between the decline in testing and the decline in the number of cases. This serves political purposes, even if unmistakable consequences show up after the election.
About 1 in 5 Florida residents is counted as senior. Large numbers of Floridians have risk factors like heart disease, diabetes, COPD or obesity. I have not been able to untangle these statistics to get accurate totals, but I estimate that about 1 person in 4 is at increased risk. From our current totals I get a mortality rate of 1.6% for the general population. People at risk may have higher mortality rates. If all 5 million I consider at higher risk are infected, we could see 100,000 deaths in this state alone. A more realistic number could be 50,000. This is still appalling as a politically acceptable toll.
), as long as you don't have any symptoms. But maybe they will change this in the future so that household members too will have to stay at home for a while, and avoid close contact with people other than the household members.
