Simple Laboratories testing for COVID-19 in Harwood Heights (photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin Garcia) |
This was held from Wednesday's paper—space issues—but since it's already online, I don't see the harm in sharing it here. It should run Thursday.
Testing. What’s that all about? I understand, they scrape inside your nose with a giant Q-tip, send the tip off to a lab to determine whether you’ve been infected by COVID-19.
But toward what end?
If you’re really sick, doctors need to know if it’s coronavirus to guide treatment. No confusion there. But what’s the goal of testing the general population? To track the pandemic’s spread? Important, but that isn’t why people are jamming National Guard drive-thru locations. Fear? Mere curiosity?
The general idea, as best I understand it, is that you may have been infected but had no symptoms — many do not — and once you learn you were already infected but are OK now, then you can then breathe a big sigh of relief and go about your business, packing into bars, jamming into church pews, secure in the knowledge you can’t get sick because you already have been.
You’d think that, desperate to get the economy back, both the dithering federal government and people protesting the lockdown would unite in one voice to demand those tests, now.
But they’re not. The federal government hems and haws like Hamlet, then shrugs and tells the states to figure it out — all while Fox News types cram statehouse steps to decry any organized attempt to save their lives as fascism.
Even municipalities are trying to get people tested, as are businesses like Simple Laboratories of Harwood Heights, a relatively new (founded 2014), relatively small (200 employees) diagnostic lab reaching over the paralyzed health care system to the public, sorting out the general confusion as it goes.
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