I am shocked to say that within a few weeks with the help of our Chinese antagonists – we could have the plague under control and our entire workforce back, sports, theaters, restaurants all opened even in New York City! How? A brilliantly simple and elegant solution has been proposed by Dr. Robert Epstein in an article just printed in The Daily Caller.
The simple answer: Test Everyone. How? As Dr. Epstein suggests:
“what if President Trump asks or orders our biotech industry to develop a cheap, disposable coronavirus test that people can self-administer, just like those disposable pregnancy tests you see at the dollar stores? A billion dollar incentive would assure that the new device is ready for FDA scrutiny in three or four days (one of my contacts in biotech tells me that such a test has already been developed). Then the president asks or orders our manufacturers to produce 350 million of these little devices – perhaps with even with the help of our evil adversary the Chinese and their factories. That order could be fulfilled in a few weeks, with millions of the devices distributed to different regions of the US as quickly as they are produced.
As they reach us, we all self-test, and those of us who are carriers self-isolate, whether we’re symptomatic or not. When the carriers are separated from the non-carriers, transmission of the virus stops cold, and the millions of non-carriers among us can immediately return to work or school. In other words, by testing everyone, we not only save countless lives, we also save the economy.”
It’s not the elderly or necessarily even those with underlying conditions who need to be isolated – ONLY the carriers. Universal testing is being done right now in Iceland. Of course, our population is a tad larger but don’t tell me that we can’t do exactly what Dr. Epstein has proposed for a monumentally less cost to our country in terms of deaths and economic hardship. If we continue on the authoritarian lock down path we are now on, we may never recover. This country was not designed to look like the authoritarian regimes in China or the former USSR. The only times in our history where we have gone down that path is during war time and the Great Depression. There are many folks advising the President right now who are taking the Chinese model to slowing the virus. As many on the illiberal left have shown, they love the power. And though I have been a supporter of Trump, I do not like to see the glint in his eyes at these task force briefings where he says he has “absolute authority”. If this emergency continues to be dealt with like an authoritarian regime, then he is right, but our entire way of life goes down the tubes. Civil liberties be damned during war. Remember our now beloved Lincoln did away with habeous corpus and he issued other “unconstitutional” directives in his quest to “save” the union. If we can’t solve this soon, put America back to work and live in a free and open society, then we are truly done as a free republic. Dr. Epstein’s model is the only model that makes sense if we want to have an honest open and FREE Republic.