Well, this just keeps getting better (not).

I was curious about testing in LA County. The County has a population of about 10 million and right now the numbers are miniscule. As of noon today it's 2,474 confirmed cases and 44 deaths. The big deal though is testing so I found this article from two days ago. The guy is both an ER physician and the Medical Director of the LA County Fire Dept.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-28/introducing-l-a-s-new-coronavirus-testing-czar-can-he-improve-our-grossly-inadequate-capacity-so-far

I've read this twice now to get a good grip on what he's saying. It's very easy to say "Where's the tests", "why do other countries have all this testing?" "It's all Trumps fault", etc, etc. This is a very complex question, read what he says about this test, that test, false negatives, does a hospital have their own lab or do they send it out? A lot of moving parts here. He's not mentioning the type of test the President just talked about this afternoon from Abbot. It's also very interesting reading his explanation of why doing testing on people with no symptoms is really a waste of time which sort of coincides with what I've said already, the reported death rate is way too high. We'll never know for sure though and against that is the point about overwhelming the healthcare system. If that happens the death rate surely goes up.

Overall a good read even though I'm not thrilled with his conclusions especially considering how low the numbers are right now. It just seems inconceivable to me that we can go from 2,500 cases to some huge number in a fairly short period of time. LA is nowhere near as densely populated as NYC. Then with all the personal sanitation and social distancing going on but yeah, he's the doctor and he's on the front lines so...

To keep my sanity I keep focusing on the good news stories, Tom Hanks and his wife are fine, Prince Charles at age 71 is fine and on and on with many stories about older folks who got through this in good shape. It's a risk for sure but it's not an automatic death sentence.

Bob

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