We made a mistake with the masks. Now they can just be tests.

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We can just control the saliva. We may only check sample equipment at a time. We can even let other people control the other. These controls aren’t perfect, but they’re not.

By Aaron E. Carroll

Dr. Carroll is a contributing opinion writer.

We made a mistake at the beginning when we talked about masks. We’re making the same mistake now with the evidence.

Discussion of these problems highlights the other thought tactics of doctors and public fitness experts. Doctors, doctors like me, treat patients one at a time. Our duty is to that person. It is thought that has led many of us to concentrate only on the maximum effective N95 mask at first. We knew we didn’t have enough for the fitness staff and we knew that the homemade masks wouldn’t be painted as well in the workplace or in the hospital. So we told other people not to use them. Last February, I asked other people on Twitter not to “waste” the mask, to “leave them to those who want them.”

Of course, we now know that the message was incorrect. I deserve to have relied more on my public physical training. Public fitness experts focus more on giant teams than individuals. They don’t want masks to paint perfectly for everyone. They are pleased to see that a smaller child gains advantages in a giant population. And there are models that seem to indicate that if the masks are 60% effective, less than three-quarters of other people would want to use them for a disease like Covid-19.

For this reason, many doctors argue that we will have to leave these tests for the sickest. “In reality, it would probably not be imaginable in most of the United States to try to implement a type of test strategy in which tests are run several times, especially if the effects don’t come back for a while,” Dr. Tina Tan, a board member of the Society of Infectious Diseases of America, told The Hill. “It’s using critical resources that can be spent more elsewhere.”

But this type of control isn’t the only one that can identify the infected. We don’t have to take samples of nasopharyngeal samples. We may simply apply a few inner touches to the nose. We can even control saliva.

Evidence collecting samples in this way would possibly be less accurate. But they can also be collected very quickly, in giant groups, with minimal supply. They can also be collected through Americans themselves at home. We can also make tons of them.

We can also consolidate the checks. In many parts of the United States where Covid-19 is not widespread, you can combine patterns and execute them together. If an organizational pattern is negative, you can assume that no one in the pool is inflamed and move on. If the group is positive, you want to analyze the person’s component patterns. Because the maximum groups are probably high to be negative when you check other asymptomatic people, you can check many more people while saving a lot of resources. Brett Giroir, undersecretary of health at the Department of Health and Human Services, proposed initiating these checks.

Some companies even perform immediate antigenic tests that can be performed smoothly outdoors in a lab. These tests look for safe proteins from the virus instead of genetic material. The challenge is that they would possibly lose more infections than a P.C.R. Test. But it only takes about 15 minutes to get a result, and if you run them in batch mode, you can also make the maximum probably more than 50 depending on the time. It’s not hard to believe in contexts, such as schools or sports teams, where these tests can also be incredibly useful.

In addition, examining after examination shows that the most important thing for monitoring and mitigation is how we verify others and how temporarily we can act on the results. The P.C.R. Scarcity controls that take a long time to give an answer will not help us in this effort.

We want to start accepting less accurate and more widespread tests for groups. We want to avoid tampering with messages by focusing only on the most effective tests. With testing, as with masks, more than perfect.

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