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The US government is the biggest customer in the world. Something like 80% of healthcare expenses occur in people that are old enough for Medicare.
It’s all a gouge. Heck, ain’t there a sittin’ sen-a-tor took 2 billion of the Fed giving the old folks 6 x-rays a day?!
I don’t have enough lifespan left to talk about everything that is wrong with the US healthcare industry, but this failure to grasp the value of a quick at home test that was 80% accurate is just one more tragedy to throw on the burning dumpster fire that is the American response to the pandemic.
As we have seen with Trump testing, at home testing, relies on the testee to follow the guidelines when the test result comes back positive.
I realize that we all either take something serious because of your own experience, or the experience of someone close to you.
I was in a grocery store back in March of 2020. St. Louis County hadn’t gone into a lock down, reports of COVID were still fresh and news. Requiring masks hadn’t been put into effect, the recommendation to limit one shopper per household had been stressed. So I overheard a woman and her husband talking to a friend that they ran into about have had to get tested and they were waiting for the results.
I was shocked at the time that this couple hadn’t followed either strong recommendation, 1) one shopper per household, and 2) don’t go out until you get your test results.
As to testing why is it that other countries have better systems? Why has testing never reached a level that we need/needed here?
Nothing that we didn’t already knew, Deborah Birx was giving cover to Trump although she knew that Covid could cause more than 500K deaths. “But hey if I don’t they will find someone else, so it might as well be me”.
Maybe it could be chalked up to FDA bureaucratic inertia, supply chain issues, or some combination. But the Biden administration’s approach to this lately isn’t very encouraging.
Psaki just a couple of weeks ago in a WH presser was poo-pooing the idea of sending test kits to every home. Something like “What, we should send them to all homes if they want them or not?” It was oddly dismissive. Like sure, just go stand in line for a couple of hours at a public health testing center, while you mingle with possibly infected people. What a great idea.
I thought about getting one or two home test kids to have on hand, just in case my wife or I get suspected symptoms, but they’re not available in my area. All the drugstores are sold out. Next step is looking online, and filtering out the legit ones from the scams. It shouldn’t be this hard.
This is the one thing that rubbed me the wrong way in Biden’s Covid speech on Tuesday, where he said (paraphrasing) that we’re finally where we need to be on testing. That’s bullshit.
Neighbors of ours were in Germany recently.
Rapid home test kits there are widely available for 85 cents each.
It can be done.
We’ve never been where we needed to be on testing.
I do seem to remember that once Wuhan had released the genetic code for COVID they sent it out to all countries. There was a problem in the US with developing testing because of a flaw. Which, again if I’m remembering correctly, should’ve only set us back a few weeks.
Other countries with national health systems seem to have been able to overcome this testing deficiency. But then I guess their system and interface with government it would easier to marshal the resources needed to get this part done. Plus because of NHS they can track better.
Omicron?
Just another libtard hoax, according to a highly credible (cough cough) source…
Western Europe is awash in cheap, rapid tests that don’t appear to be leading to appreciably better infection numbers than in the U.S.A. over the last year or so. Transmission is driven by people gathering together indoors with other people, and you’re not going to break that chain with a test that only catches 80% of infections, especially when most people can’t be bothered with it in the first place or just ignore a positive result because they feel fine.
We really need to partition the country. Dr. Wino knows that what he is saying is BS, but he has to say it in order to please target audience, Those who believe democrats are thieving, immoral communists in the best of cases. And it turns out such an audience is so large (40%? 50%?) and intransigent that there is simply no way we can go on sharing the country. Better a clean divorce now due to irreconcilable differences than a violent one a in a few years time.
And yet Germany’s Delta outbreak was still pretty bad because people are morons who insist on gathering together indoors anyway.
I’m with you on this. The malicious incompetence of Dump’s regime has broken the system and all faith in science. Everything is a commodity to be bought and sold, and most can’t afford it anyway, or were trained that nothing can be trusted.
Around the same time (March or April '20) I was waiting for my son to pick me up at the dentist. The GQP hadn’t had the mask mandates overturned yet. The AT&T store was next door in the strip mall. A guy is walking up to open it up for the day, talking on the phone with what seemed to be perhaps a district manager, saying “Yeah, I already called and left a message for her to let her know I was exposed. I was planning on going on lunch today to get tested. I’ll let you know what they say. Gotta go now, have to open things up.”
Amazing how the Dems were able to get it to start in South Africa, then spread to Europe and Canada before it showed up here, isn’t it? Of course if you question them on that part, they usually just wave their hand and change the subject.
The scandal-starved press has latched onto a new shiny object: A lack of home test kits. As they gleefully parrot their latest Beltway-gossip “scoop”, they shift focus from the lede: That 100 million Americans still refuse to get a vaccine that is free, quick, and widely-available.
On what planet is there any confidence that the Idiot-Americans who walk among us would value free, quick, and widely-available tests any more than they do vaccines?
Everyone seems to want a magic bullet that will effortlessly solve COVID without them having to change their behavior – which, of course, is madness. That’s not what responsible adults do; that’s what self-centered children do.
We all need to fundamentally change our behavior for the duration. No magic shot, pill, or test will immunize us from the need to wash our hands, socially distance, mask, and – most importantly – not travel through crowded airports and packed flights while spreading virus from one end of America to the other.
Infecting your entire family (and millions of strangers) with a fatal disease is not the goal of “The Holidays”, but that’s exactly what’s currently unfolding all around us. I swear to G-d, we are surrounded by toddlers of voting age and politicos too spineless to tell them the unpleasant but necessary truth.
To be charitable we didn’t know how deadly COVID -19 would become. We lived through Ebola and SARS. But I will admit that when working retail I and my co-workers worked sick. When the biggest part of your job is to be there, then you be there.
Except that wasn’t what the Governor and State Dept of Health had as an Emergency Order. He should have quarantined until he got his test results, not go into work and try and get a test on lunch and wait days for results.
But, but my freedom, my family, and not to mention I can’t stand myself therefore I need others to distract me.
Babs was wrong, “people who need people are not the luckiest people in the world”.
And that’s why I was, and am disturbed, except when I thought I should get tested because I wasn’t feeling well. I made my appointment, and did some errands prior to taking the test. I justify my behavior because I live alone. It’s just me, so I rationalized it by telling myself “look lastroth at how many times over how many weeks and months have you not been in contact with people”. And I wear my mask. I wore it before the vaccines, during the interval between shots, and then even after getting both shots.
I continued to wear my mask even while I was fully vaccinated, and then the booster, and after the booster. In all this time-March 2020 to the present there were been 3-4 times I was in a group of people where I did not have my mask on, but had had my two shots.