#test isolate trace

In this our new world it’s easy to become confused about what’s happening and forget what an effective response should be to a primary problem. Unfortunately we’ve lost track of what the primary problem is. We’re currently worried about enough hospital beds, ventilators, medical support items, and trained staff. That’s all medical and a distraction from the real problem. We should be worried about public health instead. The real goal is to stop the contagion. Unfortunately at this time there is no vaccine, nor treatment so the only tools at our disposal are “testing” and “keeping distance” – public health tools. “Testing” is for government and “keeping distance” is for individuals. Even more unfortunate our current government leaders are unschooled in how to effectively operate a governing system and are poor at leadership as well. Oh, and they don’t believe in science either. A remarkably bad combination.

The real problem is the spread of the virus, not surviving it. Surviving is important, but it’s not the primary problem. It’s a result. If you prevent the spread you mitigate a lot of the survival problems. However, if you spend time and energy on the survival portion you’ve done nothing about the spread and it only gets worse. Much worse. And it can get worse fast.

As innocent citizen bystanders all we can do is “wear the mask”, keep 6 to 10 feet apart and “stay at home” with only immediate family. What our government officials ought to be doing is testing all of us to find those who are carrying the virus and isolate them to “stop the spread”. Then we all wait until scientist develop a vaccine, it gets distributed and we start the long process of returning to a new normal.

Now that the “Re-Opening” has gone so wrong we’ve lost most of the benefit of the sacrifices of the lock-down and we’ll have to start over again. We’ll have to isolate ourselves again until the spread rate drops down to a number that can be “contact traced” effectively. Isolation and contract tracing will then allow us to reduce the rate of spread down to single digit numbers, not in the thousands. The only way that works is with strong testing capabilities which we currently don’t have and seem incapable of developing.

It’s always been about “testing to stop the spread”. The corona virus is a social disease and it will take modifying social behavior to stop the spread. That applies to both our government managers and individual citizens.

Information and understanding are the two most powerful weapons used in response to an attack from foreign enemies. Next is decisive action and competent followthrough quickly accompanied by a re-analysis of the situation to discern what changes might be required both in our understanding and our consequent actions. Information, analysis, action are linked together in a circular chain of building and refining our situational awareness.

However we sometimes confuse the battle-space of rhetoric with the reality of the world. In other words talk is cheap and talking loudly becomes confused with actually doing something. In unknown circumstances gathering useful information early is the best defense of all. Walls of steel and walls of words pretend to be strong, but they too often are targeted at the least important foes, usually from the past and turn out to be useless against unsuspected threats of the future.

So has gone our confrontation with a corona virus. The most important response to a communicable disease is to find it and isolate it. Test and isolate. The sooner you can do that the easier it is to accomplish. Let too much time go by and the number of infections grows into an insurmountable maze of personal contacts that are difficult to trace backwards. Without tracing back interactions and contaminations the spread of the disease remains opaque and hidden. Contagion.

The mechanism of spread is the haze of virus particles given off into the air surrounding contagious people which is generated by them breathing or coughing. It’s like a fog machine pumping out active viruses that can be silently inhaled by adjacent healthy people. It’s a game of tag where everyone still stays “it” as they tag others. The longer and closer you are to a carrier the greater your viral load becomes. Soon from only one person being sick the entire room can become full of infected people and then they leave taking it all with them to pass on to more people. It gets out of hand quickly.

The only way to win the game is to get an infected person to stop moving around, stop interacting. Find out who that is and isolate them. It sounds easy and it is if done early enough. The only way to find infected people is to test them. A useful technique is to track backward where sick people have been in the hope of finding others who became infected along the way before they too spread the virus to still yet others (contact tracing). That becomes: test, isolate, trace; over and over until the virus stops spreading.

Because some people never show symptoms of the disease (asymptomatic) the only way to find people who are spreading the virus is to test everyone. Yes you’ll find more infected people, but you’ll also find more un-infected people as well. It’s just now we’ll know who is who and be able to isolate the infected and stop the spread.

Say again – the only way to break the infection cycle is to stop infected people from interacting with other people. The only way to find infected people is to test them. Everything starts with good testing. We have yet to start. Unbelievable.

Test, isolate and trace until the virus stops spreading. The goal isn’t really to discover how many are infected, but who is infected and break the transmittal chain by limiting continued interactions with other people. We have to isolate people who are infected. Currently that’s the only action available besides wearing a mask and maintaining the distance.