Can we be real?

How many times do you think someone will be willing (or able) to quarantine for 14 days after a COVID exposure, waiting to see if they are infected?

What about the second time? Third time? Fourth time?

Testing of asymptomatic contacts empowers them to make the needed sacrifice to protect others. People don’t want to spread this and we need to be realistic about how testing helps people protect one another. And realistic about limitations.

A 14 day quarantine has a huge cost.

We know asymptomatic and presymptomatic patients can spread COVID-19. So it’s really hard to understand why we would stop testing asymptomatic patients unless we have decided we aren’t going to try to stop spread any longer. Or we don’t want the positive test numbers to look bad.

This will have even more disparate impact on disadvantaged groups who will be even less likely to have access to testing now. And more likely to spread to their vulnerable family members.

You want schools open? You want to keep them open? Any idea how disruptive a revolving door of quarantines will be for parents. Let me tell you...BAD, very bad.

The path out is to implement a bundle of protective measures and then, when the inevitable exposures occur, rigorously test all contacts to see if the measures were adequate. Once we know what is adequate we can implement & stop the quarantines. But for now...we need to test.