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Message: [QUOTE="reedny, post: 3369161, member: 1423"] The problem is ... we won't know the answer to that until surveillance testing starts. And that subject has become a political football. The federal government pretends that the states should test; and the states contend that their facilities and raw materials are a fraction of what is needed. I tend to believe the states because shortage complaints are being leveled by governors across the country on both sides of the aisle. Either way, without testing the numbers are truly ugly. We have 250,000 infections in NY. If the link you cited is to be believed, we should multiply the number of known-infected times 28-55 to determine the number of carriers. The mean coefficient is 41.5, but if we use 40 - that's [B]10M[/B] Typhoid Mary's in NY alone. I'm as anxious as anyone to return to "normal", but clearly that is not going to be possible without a massive upscaling of testing. If we can't test we don't know who's sick (or recovered or immune). And until we can identify and isolate the sick, we can't work or recreate normally. Simple as that. The main hurdle is not testing "capacity" (the number of labs or machines). It's raw materials. China makes the majority of the testing products and almost all of the PPE. Since they're not willing or able to meet demand, we find ourselves with our collective pants down. Our lust for cheap overseas goods has created a severe supply chain dependency that threatens us militarily and is now killing tens of thousands of our citizens and robbing our economy of hundreds of billions of dollars. I hope people remember this when they look at product labels. Maybe some day congress will ignore the "free marketeers", incentivize domestic manufacturing and place responsible limits on trade with military rivals. [/QUOTE]

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