Scientific Illiteracy

There is a word for being bad with math, innumeracy, but to the best of my knowledge there is not a word for being bad with science. But watching the PBS newshour tonight and listening to politicians from both sides of the aisle scream about testing made me reflect on all the misinformation and hysteria that happens when people don't think logically about any situation.

Yes, we need more testing for the virus but testing alone is not the answer to any question let alone the question of whether businesses can open. Oddly enough, it was Stephen Colbert's diss of Trump that brought that home to me. Colbert made fun of Trump for his riff on Katie Miller's positive diagnosis of Covid-19, a riff that Colbert said was the stupidest remark by a public official in history. Yes, Trump's statement was convoluted and irrational when he said that Miller was negative and then all of a sudden she was positive and that's why testing was silly.

But in an equally odd and convoluted way, Trump was right. His complaint, if I understand the gist of it, was that the tests can only show a moment in time when a person goes from being not infected to being infected. That is clearly true. So what needs to change?

The point of the testing has never been to identify who is positive for the virus even though that is what most people believe. Yes, it is important to identify those who have been exposed, but more important is to slow the spread. The way you do that is through contact tracing. The game plan needs to move toward who has been in contact with an infected person and where that exposure occurred. Unfortunately most health systems have been so overwhelmed with cases that they haven't been diligent in the contact tracing.

The US actually has a pretty good system for contact tracing because of venereal diseases and HIV/AIDS. We need to put that network into high gear if we want to open our economy and our schools.

So Trump was right that there is a problem with the tests if they go from negative to positive overnight. If that's all you are looking for then you are doing less than half of the job necessary. It isn't that Katie Miller is positive; it's that she was in the WH and in the residence and who did she acquire the virus from, and to whom could she have spread it.

All the best projections say that 70% of the US population will get the virus. Given our pre-existing conditions including simply being old, my husband and I will probably die from Covid-19 despite our faithful adherence to social distancing and masks. If Katie Miller doesn't know how she got it, all of us are at risk.