So Let Me See If I’ve Got This Straight

“We” – the Governor’s junta, at this point – can re-open Minnesota when we “have enough testing”, and we will be testing 20,000 people a day – or we will. We are assured is going to happen any day now.

Which we’ve been assured is happening any day now for over a month. And after a month of bureaucratic proclamations and excuses and deflection, we are testing about 10% of the rate that the governor says would make him talk about opening things up again.

And they wonder why people are protesting?

12 thoughts on “So Let Me See If I’ve Got This Straight

  1. 20,000 tests per day (not including weekends, of course, because that would be overtime which we can’t afford to pay) is 100,000 tests per week, for 5 million Minnesotans, will take 50 weeks, less than a year. This is totally do-able. The entire state can remain locked down for a year, no problem.

    Well, except you’d also need a second round of testing to weed out false negatives, and to catch people who may have been infected by newly arrived air travelers or interstate truckers. So maybe another 2 million, which is only another 5 months. Round it up a bit for holidays, call it 18 months total, and we’re looking at starting school again right after Labor Day, 2022.

    Piece of cake.

  2. Sweden didn’t cave into this madness and kept their country open. Of course, the media, who normally fawns over Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, as models for the U.S. because socialism works well there, gleefully reported the rise in corona virus cases. Yet, now, less than a month later, it’s being reported that the country has now reached “herd immunity” levels. No one is reporting this. If I owned a pitchfork, I would grab some friends and head to the governor’s mansion.

  3. Pa. removes more than 200 deaths from official coronavirus count as questions mount about reporting process, data accuracy

    “Health Secretary Rachel Levine said, ‘We realize that this category can be confusing, since it does change over time”

    This is what you get when leftist degenerates put a physically decrepit, mentally ill man in a dress in to make the big public health decisions for the state.

    We will never know exactly how many people succumbed to the bat flu, but we never know the exact count after any seasonal flu epidemic. The difference here is that we can be pretty sure it’s no more than half what the authorities say it is.

    The reprobates are OuTRagED that the Governors of Georgia and South Carolina are rescinding their lockdown orders. They say they fear a dreadful die-off is inevitable; dead bodies piling up untended in the streets, but we know for a fact that is steaming bullshit.

    They’re panicked that Red states will undermine their malevolently manipulated pandemic, and they know their doddering old pedophile will babbble his way through the carefully written responses they provide him to answer accustions.

  4. The “testing” BS is the new “ventilator” BS. You can’t get what you want, and even if you get what you want, it won’t do for what you wanted it to do.
    Lift the governors’ orders, open up the economy, protect vulnerable populations.
    That’s where we’ll be in a few weeks anyhow.

  5. New York has the most tests. NY also has the highest death count.
    Makes sense, in a way. You would expect the state with the most hospitalizations to perform the most tests.
    Meaning if you are in a state giving a lot of tests, you already know you have a lot of covid-19 infections.

  6. MP;
    And it turns out that the most deaths, almost everywhere, are in nursing/convalescent homes.

  7. From a conversation I had with my daughter’s future father in law, a pathologist at Mayo; he’s not quite sure what more testing will do, given that (a) we can’t test everybody every day and (b) there is a period of time where a person can transmit the disease, but has no symptoms. Worse yet, the alpha and beta error of these tests (false positives and negatives) is apparently fairly high.

    So if your goal is to reopen society by doing antibody and virus tests, it doesn’t really get you there. You might get sufficient statistical confidence with symptoms plus antibody/virus test, but even that doesn’t seem sure.

    My wife–who has a comm arts/journalism degree–read the governor’s announcement aloud for all of us, and you could hear her saying under her breath “if you can’t blind them with brilliance, you can baffle them….”

  8. bikebubba on April 24, 2020 at 1:43 pm said:

    From a conversation I had with my daughter’s future father in law, a pathologist at Mayo; he’s not quite sure what more testing will do, given that (a) we can’t test everybody every day and (b) there is a period of time where a person can transmit the disease, but has no symptoms. Worse yet, the alpha and beta error of these tests (false positives and negatives) is apparently fairly high.
    . . .

    My point exactly, BB. The governor’s want to offload making difficult decisions. Now they say they need tests. But you described the problem with testing accurately: it doesn’t give you the info you think that you need, which is both “how many people are infected” and “is this person infected.”
    And the people who clamor for testing often don’t differentiate between testing for the anti-bodies (blood test) and testing for covid-19 itself (swab test).
    It is test-fetishing.

  9. The thing that strikes me as possibly the best news is the thought that COVID does not appear to do well as an aerosol–independent of a glob of water. Hence it tends to land and disintegrate after a period of time. So it strikes me at time if we can just keep it away from our mouths and noses, we’ve greatly reduced the rate of transmission–and that would be precisely what we’d infer from the fact that apparently a lot of doctors and nurses are working pretty intensively with sufferers and not getting infected.

    Lord willing, we can smush this bug like…a bug. It’ll take some time and discipline, but we can do it.

  10. This is what I suppose happened.
    The gov hates to make decisions, because then he will be held accountable.
    So he asks the public health experts what it will take to re-open MN “safely.”
    The public health experts want data so they say “testing,” meaning the unicorn of a test that can easily manufactured, easily distributed, and 100% accurate.
    Gov says “well I can’t reopen the state until we have everyone tested.”
    Which will never happen.
    The goalposts have been moved.
    What is missing is the democratic element and public debate, which has been forbidden.
    We are not ging to a good place, ladies and gentlemen.

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