Doctors express concerns about the downsides of mass Covid testing
From beginning, health officials stressed importance of testing
This article first appeared in The Lakeland Times (lakelandtimes.com)
From the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, public health officials unleashed an array of strategies to fight the virus, strategies that health officials said were essential but which were controversial from the start: quarantines, lockdowns, school and business closures, the quest for a vaccine and then vaccine mandates, mask mandates, social distancing, and, not least, testing and contact tracing.
Nearly two years later, of all those strategies, only social distancing has stood the test of time, at least without significant contention. Some of the strategies, such as lockdowns and school and business closures, arguably proved to be ineffective, if not outright disasters, while the effectiveness of masking and quarantines remain hotly contested.
Even vaccines are in the cross-hairs because, while they have reduced Covid hospitalizations and deaths, their protective effectiveness has failed after only months, they have caused an alarming amount of reports of serious side effects and even death — as many as all other vaccines combined over the past 30 years — and the long-term health consequences of the vaccination, not to mention of the added boosters, remain unknown and untested in clinical trials.
As for testing, there were also critics of its widespread use from the start, though their protestations garnered little attention. To be sure, an argument over testing paled next to battles going on over school closures, lockdowns, and universal masking. Not to mention, too, that public health officials and their corporate consultants were adamant about its importance.
Early on, for instance, in a response typical of government agencies in the early months of the pandemic, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said quick mass testing was key to getting things back to normal.
“Testing for Covid-19 is so important that in April 2020, the NIH launched the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) Initiative to develop rapid, easy-to-use, accurate testing and make it available nationwide,” the agency announced.
In May of 2020, McKinsey and Company, a global management consulting firm, led a corporate stampede in urging a ramp up of testing around the world.
“Countries need to think about building surge capacity in traditional public-health approaches to control the virus’s spread — disease surveillance, contact tracing, and targeted quarantines,” the company wrote on its website in May 2020. “…To detect and control flare-ups quickly, widespread access to viral testing will become increasingly important as countries and cities prepare to relax distancing measures.”
But not everybody was jumping on the universal testing bandwagon. While almost all medical professionals endorsed diagnostic testing for symptomatic and high-risk groups, many believed most testing should be preserved for those groups. Widespread screening of asymptomatic populations, as well as of low-risk populations such as young students, would produce too many false-positives with significant downsides, these critics argued, such as the quarantining and removal from the classroom of healthy students, and lost productivity in the workplace.