OPINIONISTA: Coronavirus: Test the testing and if it fails, fix it — fast

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The big issues facing our country are not illegal cigarettes, when we can exercise, or whether we can get warm food at the supermarket. The big issues are how to drive the reproduction rate of the virus below one. One part of the solution is the good practice of hygiene, physical distancing and masking up. The other part is testing, tracing, isolation, and hotspot management.

Shortly after the Berlin wall fell, one of us was asked to meet with the top managers of a Trabant plant. The parking lot was full of trabbies with faults rendering them unfit for market. As far as the factory manager was concerned, they were made to spec. He had achieved the targets that he was set. But they did not fulfil the basic requirement of an automobile. They did not work., driving passengers after testing positive for Covid-19. There was, of course, the immediate outrage.

Let’s compare this with the process in Wuhan, where timeous testing was the key to the lifting of lockdown. Anecdotally anyone entering or leaving a building was screened for temperature. If they tested positive, they were immediately taken to a dedicated facility and their lungs were CT scanned. In our country, CT scan turnaround times are at best several hours. But by targeting lungs only, Wuhan radiographers, working with radiologists, were able to reduce the process to minutes.

As Bill Gates put it, if the test comes back positive what should the patient do? Send their contacts a letter of apology?Over the next few weeks, as the economy opens up, a lot of focus will be on managing potential hotspots. All enclosed spaces where workers spend long periods in close proximity to one another are Petri dishes for the spread of COV-2. The United States shows just how difficult it is to maintain safe production in meat plants.

Like East Germany in the 80s and 90s, South Africa has fallen behind in terms of basic management practices. We make absurd statements, such as: “We are good at policy, but bad at implementation.” There is no reason why it should take us a week to do what the Chinese do in four hours.Basically, we need to map the process and identify bottlenecks, handovers and points of weakness. We need to optimise the repetitive tasks with standard operating practices.

 

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The issues I have are SPECIFIC •Lack of food for starving •Abuse by law enforcers-visible for lockdown violations but not crime •Where tests being done •Test result delays •Domestic violence •WHO are NCC? •Peurile 'bans' that seem power related, with no evidentiary back-up

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