United States is considered well behind\u00a0<\/a>other countries when it comes to the availability of testing generally. Why can\u2019t we figure out this solution?<\/p>\nNCL friend and brilliant inventor of the SawStop, a safe table saw, Steve Gass, came up with a novel approach to employ universal testing that would get most of us back to work. His proposal is below. I\u2019ll end with it, because it says it all:<\/p>\n
A cure for the coronavirus pandemic already exists.\u00a0Contrary to our expectation\u00a0that cures manifest exclusively as biological agents \u2013 medicine for the sick or vaccines for the healthy \u2013 the cure for this outbreak\u00a0is technological. From the Oval Office to Kansas kitchens we\u2019re already talking about it, even while failing to recognize its true potential. Those elusive Covid-19 tests, if utilized daily, by every American, have the power to save our lives and our economy within the month.<\/em><\/p>\nTo date, the U.S. has only employed testing reactively\u00a0\u2014\u00a0to diagnosis a disease after symptoms indicate probable infection\u00a0\u2014\u00a0which wins us no real advantage when epidemiological evidence indicates up to 40 percent of transmissions occur covertly, days before symptoms appear, and CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield estimates that 25 percent of carriers (and spreaders) may never manifest symptoms at all. We can continue to hide out at home indefinitely, banking on a vaccine in 12-18 months, but public health expert Dr. David Katz calls that a recipe for \u201cineffectively fighting the contagion even as we are causing economic collapse.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\nInstead, we must\u00a0deploy tests\u00a0offensively. They must become our mass-produced instruments of war.<\/em><\/p>\nHere\u2019s the plan of attack: one month from today, each of us is tested daily for Covid-19, obtaining immediate results. If positive, you isolate at home and instantaneously eliminate the virus\u2019s prime advantage: its ability to stealthily propagate from \u201cpeople out there shedding the virus who don\u2019t know that they\u2019re infected,\u201d according to infectious diseases expert Dr. Jeffery Shaman. Meanwhile, the healthy among us freely move back out into our communities, flashing our daily health certificates like boarding passes to gain admittance to workplaces, schools, and stores, certain we won\u2019t harm or be harmed by the people with whom we interact. We\u2019ll have immediately shifted, as economists Dr. Paul Romer and Dr. Alan M. Garber insist we must, to a \u201ctargeted approach that limits the spread of the virus but still lets most people go back to work.\u201d\u00a0The very first day we implement universal daily testing and selective isolation commerce resumes, the viral transmission rate plummets, and the virus exponentially decays. The crisis ends.<\/em><\/p>\nThe challenge in this crisis of scarcity, when too few can access masks let alone diagnostic devices, is to build enough testing units,\u00a0now,\u00a0so that all 330 million Americans can be tested daily. This will require at least 1 million community-based machines adapted for parallel processing of multiple tests simultaneously. If we begin tomorrow and labor 24 hours per day it will take just under 12 days to produce and deploy a million machines at a production rate of one unit every second. That\u2019s not just daunting. It\u2019s mind-boggling.<\/em><\/p>\nBut it\u2019s not impossible.<\/em><\/p>\nIn May of 1940 the Greatest Generation listened incredulously as President Roosevelt challenged them to \u201charness the efficient machinery of America\u2019s manufacturers\u201d to produce 50,000 combat aircraft in 12 months to confront the \u201capproaching storm\u201d of a global war \u2013 a goal exceeding the total of all planes built in the U.S. since the Wright brothers\u2019 initial 1903 flight. No one believed an 18-ton plane with 450,000 parts and 360,000 rivets in 550 different sizes could be mass produced, let alone efficiently. But our repurposed auto factories did just that, with Ford Motor Co. churning out one bomber per hour at peak production to secure our safety and win the war.<\/em><\/p>\nOur nation still has the know-how, the manufacturing infrastructure, and the industrial resources to save ourselves again by building and deploying a million Covid-19 testing units by the end of the month if we make it our highest national priority starting today. We have men and women yearning to go back to work and we must employ them to optimize\u00a0<\/strong>established supply chains, man assembly lines, and reinvigorate distribution channels. No single state\u2019s factories can meet the one-unit-per-second output required, but pooled national resources can. The cost and effort will be substantial, certainly, but pale in comparison to the misery wreaked if we let a quarter million Americans die instead.<\/em><\/p>\nMake no mistake: World War III is upon us. We must once again wake the sleeping giant, mustering America\u2019s industrial might to save ourselves and the whole world with us by rallying resources to test each of us, over and over again, as if our livelihoods and lives depend on it.<\/em><\/p>\nBecause they do.<\/em><\/p>\n—–<\/p>\n
Stephen Gass, PhD, J.D.,<\/strong>\u00a0is a physicist, a patent attorney, and the retired President and founder of SawStop, LLC, the nation\u2019s foremost supplier of premium table saws and the world leader in table saw safety. He is the principal inventor on over 100 patents covering electrical and mechanical innovations in power tools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Sally Greenberg, NCL Executive Director During this Covid pandemic, Americans have been incredibly patient and observant of guidelines for social distancing and staying home. But it can\u2019t last forever. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false},"categories":[287,416,16,292,291],"tags":[316],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3344"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18225,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3344\/revisions\/18225"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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