UW expert: Plans to reopen being built ‘on insufficient knowledge’
Apr 21, 2020, 12:24 PM
Murals and paintings from local artists cover the side of businesses and restaurants in Seattle closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Meili Cady/KIRO Radio)
(Meili Cady/KIRO Radio)
As many states have started to relax their social distancing guidelines, one expert at the University of Washington warns that even now, we might not have the necessary information to make these decisions.
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Speaking to NBC’s Today, UW’s Dr. Vin Gupta cautioned that without an expanded system of testing, any roadmap to reopening states is being built on incomplete data.
“The challenge here is that we’re building a policy on a state-based level … on insufficient knowledge,” he noted.
According to researchers at Harvard University, the United States won’t be able to safely relax social distancing measures unless it triples its daily coronavirus tests within the next month.
Harvard estimates that the U.S. will need to be performing between 500,000 and 700,000 daily tests if it’s going to reopen by the middle of May. In April, we’ve averaged roughly 146,000 tests per day.
So far, a small fraction of the population has been tested for the virus, making it difficult to determine exactly how many infections the country is actually dealing with.
“We have less than 1% of Americans tested, so how can we confidently pursue a different path in terms of social distancing? It just doesn’t make sense,” said Gupta.
In the meantime, other testing methods are beginning to roll out nationwide. That includes a blood test with ability to detect COVID-19 antibodies in patients, and potentially identify people who might be immune to the virus after successfully recovering.
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At UW Virology, the lab there is now able to run between 12,000 and 14,000 of those tests a day, with more resources on the way to increase those totals.
All that being so, Dr. Gupta points out that there’s still quite a bit we don’t know about the level of immunity someone might have after getting the virus.
“The upshot here is we shouldn’t be building a return-to-work strategy on a test we don’t know has any clinical meaning,” he noted. “It’s unclear if these antibody tests can tell us anything about immunity — we just don’t know.”
