There continues to be a flurry of controversy over President Trump allegedly ordering testing to be slowed down:
President Donald Trump on Tuesday insisted he was serious when he revealed that he had directed his administration to slow coronavirus testing in the United States, shattering the defenses of senior White House aides who argued Trump’s remarks were made in jest.
“I don’t kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make it clear,” Trump told reporters, when pressed on whether his comments at a campaign event Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., were intended as a joke.
“We have got the greatest testing program anywhere in the world. We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases,” he continued. [Politico]
And, yes, this is an important issue. However, in a sense it’s a bit of a red cape. If we really want to get a feeling for our current contretemps, there are three numbers and how they’re changing that would strike me as important if I cannot trust that testing is being conducted in an urgent and honest manner.
- The ratio of Covid-19 associated hospitalizations to all hospitalizations. The behavior of this number is a proxy for how the coronavirus is impacting vulnerable populations, or, in other words, an inverse correlation for society’s ability to safeguard those populations.
- The ratio of Covid-19 cases occupying ICU beds to all ICU beds. The closer this number approaches one, the more worried leaders should be; if this number is trending upwards, it indicates the general infection rate may be trending higher, or a vulnerable population has been breached.
- The ratio of Covid-19 associated deaths to all deaths. How this number is changing over time gives us a clue as to how well treatments are working as well as the morbidity of the infection in the general population. It’s imprecise, but the direction of the numbers tell us if things are getting worse or better.
These numbers are vulnerable to political corruption in that they can be improperly collected and/or reported, but they do eliminate the variable of measuring the current rates of infection, which is more vulnerable to political corruption simply through neglect, along with collection and reporting.
And while the entire testing mechanism can be confusing to untrained people, pointing at an ICU overflowing with patients is more easily understood to be a disaster.
