cisgenderedAggie said:
DTP02 said:
I have a question about testing:
What does it accomplish? What are the goals of testing?
We've gotten family members tested for flu a couple times in order to know whether we want tamiflu. Other times we've gotten tamiflu just based on symptoms. Either way, there is nothing like tamiflu currently for corona.
Is this just about trying to slow the spread by tracking individuals and who they might have interacted with?
If so do we stop testing once this hits critical mass and it becomes impractical or outright impossible to continue to try to stop the spread?
I don't know...maybe it might help to know what you're treating? To know what to do with a patient, maybe what not to do? To continue to learn about how the virus and how it spreads, how lethal it actually is, what is different from "just the flu", what drugs and vaccines that are ramping up for testing do and don't work.....
In science, it's just generally useful to be able to measure things.
Your unnecessarily dismissive response predictably led to some of what I'm trying to get at but which I haven't seen anyone ask:
- Does it help the patient if the doctor knows it's corona?
We don't have a cure for corona, so we are really treating symptoms while the virus runs its course. Since the symptoms vary anyway, the treatment prescribed would seem to be based on the observed symptoms rather than the cause.
My guess is that testing at this point is more about trying to protect the healthcare workers and slow the spread than helping the individual patient. My further guess is that at some point we will give up on trying to trace the steps of infected patients as it will be too widespread. There may continue to be some benefit to healthcare workers as they attempt to segregate suspected corona patients and implement additional safeguards in terms of personal protection and sterilization in those wards.
The rest of your answer justifies testing a percentage of the suspected corona patients so as to continue to learn about it, not testing all of them.