To the Editor,

“Testing, testing, testing” chanted Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a recent Sunday morning gasbag show. Her mantra is echoed by elected officials and public health bureaucrats including our own governor, Gina Raimondo. I keep wondering testing who and with what? When? Where? How often?

The objective they say is “to flatten the curve” which simply means spreading the number of people infected with COVID-19 over a long period of time so as to not overwhelm the country’s health care system.

A public health expert at Yale University said there are only two ways to control a virus. One is by developing a vaccine, which according to most estimates means 18 months to two years. Can we really expect the largest economy in the world to be crippled for that length of time? What is the trade off in terms of deaths that result from having twenty or thirty percent of the workforce unemployed?

The second solution is by developing “herd immunity”. Frankly, this means accepting the fact that the weakest and those most susceptible to the disease will succumb to it. The surviving members of the population will develop immunity and the novel corona virus will disappear. This is what happened in the “Spanish flu” epidemic that killed over 100 million people around the world in 1918-19. .

The difference now is the virus kills mostly the elderly and those with underlying health issues like asthma, high blood pressure and COPD. The Spanish flu targeted the young and healthy that had not developed an antibody. The immune system of seniors had been exposed to the “Russian flu” epidemic of 1898.

It is thought that testing for antibodies in the blood can determine who has had the virus and can safely return to the workforce. However, experience with HIV indicates that it takes up to three months for the antibody to be detectable. Moreover, the common cold, which is caused by a coronavirus, also triggers the antibody. Both factors lead to many false positive and negative readings making the blood test unreliable at best and useless at worst.

Suppose a doctor sends you to a drive-up testing site to have a swab shoved up your nose and into your sinus to determine whether you have COVID-19. The next day you are notified that the test came back negative. You breathe a sigh of relief forgetting that after the test you stopped to buy some groceries placing them in a shopping cart that had been used by someone with the virus and not disinfected afterward. You inadvertently touched your nose and are now contaminated.

The only thing the swab test accomplished was to add your result to databases used by researchers and the statistical models cited by politicians in press briefings.

It is called a “novel caronavirus” because doctors had never seen it before and have no treatment or vaccine to prevent it. Anyone who has the disease and needs to be placed on a respirator to breathe has only about a twenty percent chance of survival. That is why you see hospital personnel cheering when a surviving patient is discharged and sent home.

A senior researcher at a Johns Hopkins think tank who was involved in the Ebola epidemic that ravaged Africa says that “contact tracing” is essential to controlling the spread of the novel coronavirus. He estimates that 100,000 tracers at a cost of $3.6 billion will be required to staff a comprehensive tracking system in the U.S. This is based on the tracers working 12 hour shifts seven days a week. Like that is going to happen.

The key question I have not yet heard answered is why the Chinese Communists were developing a hybrid virus between the SARS coronavirus and the H1N1 influenza bug in their Wuhan laboratory No. 14 using bats as the host? Anyone care to guess?

Richard J. August

North Kingstown