According to an article in The Washington Post, dated April 16th, 2020, 22 million Americans are unemployed. There is a strong desire for some to open the economy right away to avoid a collapse of the economy – I get it. However, there are many people who say we should test everyone first. We know this will take time, a lot of time, as there are well over 300 million Americans.
My part of America is Brooklyn, New York, where people know how to survive, even thrive in difficult times, but this are extraordinarily difficult times. Inaction and blame seemed to spread at the speed of a virus
We can kill two birds with the same stone. No, not in one throw but in two well-intentioned pitches. The federal government can “federalize” many small businesses that would most likely go out of business to conduct the virus testing. I prefer this to someone taking the test at home – don’t trust it. There are people protesting the shelter-in-place order. I cannot see them taking the test. I am no comfortable with my employer conducting testing.
The government would contract with and pay these small businesses to test the public. I see a fair amount of administrative work, not to mention the person that will take the sample. These initiatives could take a up to 6 months, for those businesses and workers will do this. Now, if we could do this, we keep businesses open, mitigate the unemployment rate, address a public safety issue, and we get millions of people and buisness paying taxes. We already have voting districts, right? Well, we can work by-the-district, and have the results reported in the same way political races are reported. I would love to see the daily death count replace with the daily test count.
This may not be the best idea, but whatever we come up with must be implemented now. And, we need to learn from this experience, because some other virus is out there ready to take its turn in the spotlight. Not to make light of a bad situation, but what if the next pandemic instead of attacking our lungs, causes us to lose positive control of our saliva glands and lower jaw?! We would have to walk around wearing bibs. Imagine, people would dehydrate, misunderstandings would be rampant, just a mess.
We need a plan. If you follow my work you know I like redundancy, and I like to combine problems. By doing this it may be possible to apply one solution to multiple problems. Kill two birds with one stone but two throws. Send your highbrow ideas to your local elected officials.
Shawn Abrams |