Frequent, rapid testing could turn national Covid-19 tide within weeks

Wasn't this the White House strategy? They were doing daily rapid antigen tests, and have had several outbreaks.

This has been obvious for months -- Romer has been yelling from the rooftops about it -- and yet no major western govt save the Brits have attempted to even try this strategy. Madness.

I think the US gov't is too mired down in ... well, problems ... to do anything this pragmatic, efficient and effective.

It won&#x27;t turn the tide, because there is a huge population in the US which, as an expression of political identity, will refuse to get tested — or wear masks or take any other precautions for that matter.<p>This group will keep the virus alive no matter what, endangering not only themselves, but the rest of us.<p>ETA: Many downvotes, many upvotes. Downvoters: I would love to hear from you what you find objectionable.

These tests have a very high false negative rate. Before a test you have about a 13% chance of having covid. After a negative test it&#x27;s about 11%. It doesn&#x27;t seem plausible that&#x27;s enough to make a big difference.

I would love for this whole thing to end as much as anyone, but I don&#x27;t see how this gets anything back to normal.<p>In January of this year, there were a negligible amount of people in the US with Covid. Let&#x27;s say now in November everyone gets tested every day, and you have an unbelievable compliance for self quarantining on positive results. It would never happen, but pretend it&#x27;s 99.9% of people following the rules to &quot;drive the virus towards elimination within weeks&quot;. Great, now you think you&#x27;ve beaten it back to where it came from.<p>How does this do anything other than reset the clock back to last January just in time for next January? As soon as everyone lowers their guard and goes back to normal, it&#x27;s going to spread again. We need immunity from a vaccine or from it running its course to be done with this.<p>What am I missing? Are we going to setup nationwide contact tracing this time? Just a few visitors from other countries, and we&#x27;re at it again.

At this point there are

There are over 6 vaccines that have very low expected downside (vaccines rarely have severe side effects and these have none found in thousands of tests)and are all expected to work (&gt;90%). They are all currently banned (people who want them can&#x27;t buy them legally), and the FDA is refusing to even discuss lifting the ban for 3 weeks. It seems odd to discuss anything other solution than letting people who want to take vaccines, take them.<p>Literally if the vaccines were known to have side effects 10x worse than the worst side effects in history, it would still be orders of magnitude safer to give to those over 65 than not. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;vaccinesafety&#x2F;concerns&#x2F;concerns-history.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;vaccinesafety&#x2F;concerns&#x2F;concerns-history....</a>