COVID testing rant...

[172andyou]

"They said you can't charge for a useless test" - the government just set the price at zero.

"The market sets the price." except that in your dreamworld the government controls that price.

So you believe that the government is also setting the prices for cars and trucks by not allowing them to be sold without certain safety features?

 

[crash7]

A month ago I flew with someone that two days later tested positive (not sure what type of test).

I never noticed anything. My wife and daughter never later noticed anything.

So, either I didn’t catch it at all (no masks, either) or I was like the other HUGE percent of people that simply had no symptoms, or my friend’s test was a false positive.

Which makes me question the validity/accuracy of these tests.

Kinda like the places taking your temp to get inside. All that does is tell them if I have a temp or not.

Sigh.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[RyanB]

Kinda like the places taking your temp to get inside. All that does is tell them if I have a temp or not.

Yeah, that’s more or less a gimmick. I was interning at a local skilled nursing facility here in town, and they would take your temperature before you could even drive into the parking lot. One morning I had my heat turned up in the car, so when I arrived, my skin was hotter than it typically would be. Their temp gun showed that I had a ‘fever’ and the man asked if I had my heat on, I said ‘yes I do’. He told me to roll down my window a bit further and stick my head out for a second. He took it again, and off I went!

 

[Witmo]

So don't complain when a DPE charges an AMU for a checkride, it's just the FAA exercising free market principles.

 

[SoonerAviator]

So you believe that the government is also setting the prices for cars and trucks by not allowing them to be sold without certain safety features?

Well, the gov't is certainly increasing costs by mandating those safety items . . . so it's pretty much the same as increasing costs. If nothing else changed on a vehicle from one model year to the next other than the addition of a rear view camera (gov't mandated now), then the auto maker would increase price to gain that margin back; ergo, the gov't just pushed prices up.

 

[SoonerAviator]

The government didn't set the price in my scenario. They said you can't charge for a useless test. The market sets the price. It may well be that the price goes up, because it costs more to provide a test that has medical value. It might be that the price remains the same, because of market pressures, but they only sell 100 a day instead of 500 because they can only process 100 a day in a timeline that provides medical value. But the government doesn't set the price, just prohibits charging for tests that have no medical value. Just like it prohibits the sale of vehicles that don't have certain safety features, but doesn't tell Ford what to charge.

You keep saying "charging for tests that have no medical value" . . . when did the test stop having medical value? It's still medically valid no matter what you intended to use the result for. It's just that the timeline for results didn't meet the requirement for a 3rd party air transport company.

 

[172andyou]

You keep saying "charging for tests that have no medical value" . . . when did the test stop having medical value?

When the result was delivered so late that you have been exposed to a large number of possible vectors and infected. Honestly, getting a covid test three days before flying is a practical compromise more than a medically sound procedure. Every compromise allows the virus to spread further and take more lives, so the art is trying to be practical while still doing things that have medical value. If we had been requiring same day tests for the past 6, 9 or 12 months then the market would have had an incentive to deliver tests that were more meaningful. Since we didn't require that, their incentive was to jam as many swabs up as many noses as possible, even if it took a week or more to get results, because they could still charge for every one of them.

 

[SoonerAviator]

When the result was delivered so late that you have been exposed to a large number of possible vectors and infected. Honestly, getting a covid test three days before flying is a practical compromise more than a medically sound procedure. Every compromise allows the virus to spread further and take more lives, so the art is trying to be practical while still doing things that have medical value. If we had been requiring same day tests for the past 6, 9 or 12 months then the market would have had an incentive to deliver tests that were more meaningful. Since we didn't require that, their incentive was to jam as many swabs up as many noses as possible, even if it took a week or more to get results, because they could still charge for every one of them.

Lol, the tests weren't even designed 12 months ago, and there wasn't even enough testing supplies/equipment available on a national scale to do it. But sure, injecting the government bureaucracy is always a great solution, lol.

 

[172andyou]

Lol, the tests weren't even designed 12 months ago

Well, if you're going to derisively laugh at people, be correct. The first tests were available 14 months ago in January 2020. By almost exactly a year ago, President Trump famously said on March 6th "everyone who wants a test gets a test". The UAE was already doing 200K tests per week on it citizens last March.

But sure, injecting the government bureaucracy is always a great solution

I didn't propose bureaucracy, were you meaning to respond to someone else? I proposed to require that tests be useful and let the free market do the rest. The part that it's good at. Because it failed to provide tests in a timeline that was medically useful an alarming percentage of the time.