New testing strategy

[ScatteredMama82]

Anyone up for discussing the new strategy of testing only hopsitalised patients?

If I understand correctly, then this will hide (from the public at least) the true spread of the virus. It will also make it harder to measure the mortality rate, and artificially raise it as clearly, if you're in hospital you are already a seriously ill case.

How are the public meant to make informed decisions based on the spread in their local area if we don't have a true picture of who has it?

OR, is it possible based on the percentages coming out of other countries, to extrapolate the number hospitalised to the number of the general population infected? I'd imagine that data won't be available to the public though.

It's to make us look like we've got less cases than other countries.

It's to save money on tests.

I think it's sensible to be focusing the work if medically trained professionals on treating the seriously ill, than wasting their time swabbing the mouths of every person with a cough.
With advice that you self isolate if you have symptoms, we don't need to be testing people mildly ill in my opinion.

@FlamingOranges that's true, but if we have capacity to test 10000 a day, why not use it? Not so much to diagnose those who don't need treatment, but to keep a handle on the epidemiology and monitor the spread.

It would be more than useful to know which areas had large/small concentrations of this virus.

Without this information we are blind.

Other countries have introduced drive through testing .. here we're cutting back on testing We'll have no idea where there are cases. Some people may have it and not bother to self isolate. I don't think it's a good idea.

It's really expensive and resource-heavy to use clinical diagnostic testing just to get an idea of numbers. Diagnostics should be used when the answer actually affects how the patient is managed, which in this case applies mostly to the hospitalised cases.

Assuming you can persuade people to do it (which it seems might be a big assumption at the moment), its much better just to isolate all the suspected community cases. Unless the patients are front-line healthcare workers, its also not a good use of staff and test kits to be testing mild cases in the community just to get them out of isolation a few days early.

Criminal really as if you aren't sure
you may go out
Nah spend time around kids or others and they will get a high viral load...

@WhateverHappenedToBathPearls (love your username BTW, whatever did happen to them? Slimy little balls of goo)

It's really expensive and resource-heavy to use clinical diagnostic testing just to get an idea of numbers. Diagnostics should be used when the answer actually affects how the patient is managed, which in this case applies mostly to the hospitalised cases.

This makes sense, thank you. It just feels like the shutters are coming down, and the government are going to hide behind the (falsely) low numbers reported every day at 2pm.

I guess it's because the public rely on those numbers to get a feel of how things are going, and now we can't rely on those.

We'll have no idea where there are cases

There are cases in enough places now that it's more straightforward to ask people to behave as if its everywhere. Counting cases by area will give you 'hotspots' and 'notspots' - people living in areas that look like 'notspots' will feel reassured and inevitably take fewer precautions, then the risks of spread will actually become higher in those areas.