Testing Is the Key to Getting Coronavirus Under Control
Covid-19 doesn’t appear to be unstoppable. But it will take mass testing and a lot of hard work to stop its spread in the U.S.
We’re going to need a lot more of these.
Photographer: Michael Nagle/BloombergIn the absence of a vaccine or a cure, the best way to stop an epidemic is usually to isolate the people who have the disease and track down everybody they might have infected — either isolating them, too, or watching them closely for symptoms. That’s how Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome was shut down in 2003, and how Ebola’s spread was halted in 2014.
Some infectious diseases can’t be fought this way, usually because people who’ve caught them become infectious well before they have any symptoms. Influenza is like that, which is why it’s so hard to stop even when there are vaccines. A new strain of the H1N1 swine flu virus that swept the planet in 2009, and for which a vaccine wasn’t available until late in the year, may have infected a quarter of the world’s population. Luckily, it was relatively benign — more benign than standard seasonal influenza. In the U.S., an estimated 60 million people got it, and only 12,000 died, for a case-fatality rate of 0.02%.