If you don't test a patient that's positive and put them with other patients and unprotected health personnel you'll infect others and significantly weaken the hospital's ability to treat patients. If you don't test a patient that's negative and put them with covid patients they risk getting infected, taking up an extra ICU spot, and might die. Would you want one of your loved ones in that position?
What would change in public policy with more randomized tests?
Do you know what's even worse for the hospital's ability to treat patients? If the city continues to operate normally until the number of cases is so large that it's obvious the outbreak is unmanageable even without testing.
Randomized tests would have told policy makes exactly how fast this spreads, even in Western cities. Lockdowns would have happened earlier. The total number of infected would be 1-2 orders of magnitude lower. Hospitals would have been better off.
>Would you want one of your loved ones in that position?
I wouldn't want one of my loved ones to die because my civilization was so short-sighted that it let a disease run rampant. Your appeal to emotion is garbage, and it doesn't even make sense, since all of our chances would be better if we'd known what was going on.
A full nationwide shut down without waiting for individual states to shockingly have the same issues as every other state was one possibility.
By comparison many ill people are currently being told to stay home until they have difficulty breathing, making tests have minimal clinical value. Especially as the risk of false negatives are significant.
* PCR tests to check if you are carrier of the virus right now. That's what you do with patients and personnel.
* Anti-body tests to gauge the number of people having been exposed to the virus in the past.
It takes a couple of days to develop anti-bodies so you don't want to use that one for the first use-case. And you can have anti-bodies without carrying the virus. (Well, it depends on the type of antibodies)
If you know the exposure in the general public, we would better know the real mortality, how far we are with herd-immunity, and if general quarantines do make sense, or it might be sensible to be more selective.
Hard to make this decisions in smaller contacts when you are potentially endanger real patients needing care right now Vs future "less dead" estimations.
Health systems deal with scarcity on a daily basis. There's no room for the emotional hand-wringing you're describing. Moving scarce resources from diagnosis patients to studying the population during a pandemic will be one event in a causal chain that results in deaths. It also prevents the outbreak from spreading beyond control.
Several orders of magnitude more people have been killed by uninformed policy than would have been killed by redirecting a portion of tests. What kind of MONSTER chooses for so many more people to die?!?
At this point do we even need to test most of the serious cases. if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, coughs like a duck, it's a duck. Didn't China start counting cases based on CT scans at one point too?
If policy had been informed, the number of people saved would have out-weighed the handful who died due to missing out on a test.