Recently, while we have been social distancing, my seventy sixth birthday arrived. I can remember younger times when I really didn’t think I would achieve this milestone in life so I am thrilled with my situation and I would like to celebrate just a little bit. Then I start to think about this coronavirus pandemic instead of a birthday cake with all those candles and I start to feel like curling up in the corner and pulling a blanket over my head because the risk of cake might be too much and I might not make it to my seventy seventh birthday. How should I evaluate my risks?
There is a lot of talk on the TV about testing, but I can’t figure out what I am hearing. I listen to the press briefings and I read the news articles and keep the news talk shows on in the background and I hear numbers being thrown around as it relates to testing for coronavirus. I hear numbers like one hundred thousand and that seems to be a number that experts agree to as a number of tests that we are actually performing on a daily basis. One hundred thousand sounds like a big number until I remember that we have roughly three hundred and thirty million people living in these United States of America and when I compare those two numbers I quickly start looking for my blanket.
I hear one of the supposedly informed talking heads saying that we have already tested something like two million people and that seems like a big enough number that we should be justified in having some pride in the accomplishment. Two million tests took us three, or four, or six weeks to complete and as I think about the speed of our accomplishment I start looking for my blanket again.
Clearly, we are going to need to test more than we have and we are going to need to do it way faster than we have to date. I hear more numbers being floated and they seem to be related to the daily testing milestone. I hear five million, twenty million and I think I have even heard thirty million once or twice and these are really big numbers when we are thinking about daily testing. They’re still pretty small when we consider three hundred and thirty million, but even five million tests a day would represent a lot of improvement. But wait, I just thought about something we haven’t been talking about – we haven’t been talking about how many tests we need to run if we want to go back to work. Yesterday I bumped the factoid that we don’t have enough tests available to the Congressional Doctor to test all of the Senators that are being called back to Washington D.C. on Monday and I have to interpret that a clear lack of preparedness. How many tests should we be prepared for on a daily basis because we obviously can’t test everyone? I don’t hear any conversation about this number coming from any side of the conversation. I hear the question, but I do not hear even the feeblest attempt at an answer.
I think we would be wrong to expect a testing standard for the United States in total because what makes sense in the deserts of Utah and Nevada makes no sense in New York City. So we can’t test everyone and we can’t use the same testing standard everywhere and if we can’t do that, it makes sense to me that we will, at some point, find ourselves talking about statistics. I don’t remember everything I learned about statistics in school, but my memory tells me that the term we need to get comfortable with is “statistically significant.” My memory tells me that when a small sample of a bigger population can be calculated to be “statistically significant” that means that the characteristics of the small sample will reliably be like the larger population under consideration. So, I think we will start to hear that statisticians are hard at work designing the testing we will be doing in our relatively near future. Until we start to hear from the statisticians, we are probably best served by staying at home or carefully observing social distancing. That’s what I will be doing while I plan the celebration of my seventy seventh birthday.
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