By Tom Burke / Herald columnist
I could have written this week about: Biden/Harris; Trump’s mail-in voting and post office attacks; TV advertising normalizing bad social-distancing; or coronavirus testing. With the passing of 1,000-plus people a day, testing won; we can’t ignore death.
President Trump again claimed, on Aug. 13, “We have more Cases because we do more Testing.”
Before we comment on Trump’s logic, please complete these three quick quizzes:
• If we wanted to determine the number of left-handed people in the City of Snohomish (population 10,000) we could simply ask all 10,000 people who live in the city: Are you righty or lefty? And then count ‘em up. We’d find about 10 percent, or 1,000 people, were lefties, Now if we only asked half of the people in town, we’d get about 500 left-handed-folk answers. Makes sense. But here’s the question: If only asking half the folks if they are righty or lefty, would that change the actual number of southpaws in the city? Wouldn’t there still be 1,000, but we only discovered 500 by asking just half the population?
• Now if we wanted to know the incidence of all cancers in, say, Everett, (population about 110,000) we could ask all 110,000 people if they have it; or we could test them all. We’d likely find about 6,050 with the disease. (That’s 5.5 percent of the population and it’s the national average according to the U.S. government’s National Institutes of Heath’s National Cancer Institute). But let’s say we only asked 11,000 people (10 percent of the population); how many would we find the with disease? Statistics say around 605 people. Here’s the question: How many people in Everett would actually have cancer, whether we asked 10 percent, 50 percent or all 100 percent of the population. The correct answer: about 6,050. No?
• OK. Here’s the payoff question: Let’s say we need to know how many people in the U.S. actually have the Covid-19 coronavirus, so we can establish programs and budgets for contact tracing; know what areas need to strengthen social distancing and mask-wearing; know where to surge medical supplies and assistance; and understand where we can open businesses, schools, get people back to work, and normalize life.
Clearly the optimum strategy to defeat the pandemic would be to test every person in the U.S. and have the results back in no more than 48 hours. If we did that we would know what we’re facing, where to focus resources, and how to develop a cogent, workable plan to fight the disease.
So, here’s the Trumpian question: If we do less testing, will we have fewer actual cases of Covid-19 in the U.S.? (See the above questions if you are struggling to answer this.) (And for those who are still struggling after reviewing the above, the answer is, of course, a resounding, NO!, there wouldn’t be fewer cases, we’d just know about fewer cases. The reality is: Whether we test or not, the number of cases at any point in time would be the same. In the longer term, of course, the more we test and the more we find out where the pandemic is spreading, the more we can do to stamp it out.)
Now let’s return to Trumps many-times-over-and-over-and-over-repeated claim, “We have more Cases because we do more Testing.”
Mr. President, we don’t have more cases because we do more testing. And we wouldn’t have fewer cases if we did less testing. We’d have the same number of cases whether we tested every living soul in the U.S. every single day or not one person in the country, ever.
The only difference is that, if we test, we’d know how many cases we were actually dealing with; we could monitor whether the numbers were going up or down; we would know where we needed to work hardest; and a ton of other stuff.
So, would a Trump supporter please explain the president’s logic here.
Would someone who agrees with the president please explain how you formulate a cogent, workable plan if you have no idea of the size or geographic spread of the disease because you are not testing, or not testing enough.
What kind of a man, what kind of a leader, what kind of a president says if we do less testing we’d have fewer cases of Covid-19?
The only answer I can figure: a terminally stupid one. I mean really dumb. Ignorant. Or willfully uninformed, or a liar concerned only how the “numbers” will affect his chances of reelection and to hell with the people he swore to protect.
I’m completely open to someone answering my question about the less-testing-fewer-cases logic. If you can decipher Trump’s thinking, I’ll make sure there’s space in my next column to explain why I’m wrong and Trump is right.
Who’s up to the challenge?
Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.
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