Because the entrepreneurial spirit and rebellion against authority are part and parcel of our national and cultural DNA, you can never say America is down for the count.
Sure, things look bad right now; but it’s always darkest before the dawn. And Americans are not standing idly by and passively accepting their dire fate as predicted by the “experts.” Instead, they’re fighting back, and with notable, if underplayed and unheralded, success.
For example, Abbott Labs announced Friday that it has developed a new, portable test that can determine, within five to 13 minutes, whether someone is infected with the coronavirus.
The company expects to deliver 50,000 tests per day starting next week.
Scott Gottlieb, former head of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and a medical doctor who has been at the forefront of assessing the COVID-19 pandemic, calls the new test a “game-changer.” He says it’s very likely that other Point of Care diagnostic tests will soon be coming to market.
Point of Care testing is medical testing that can be done anywhere and not just in a hospital or laboratory setting.
Point of Care testing is critically important because it will facilitate rapid and comprehensive testing, which is integral to mitigation and containment strategies that will break the epidemic spread of the virus and allow Americans to return to work.
“If we know who is infected, who is not, and who has recovered, we could greatly relax social isolation requirements and send both the uninfected and the recovered back to work,” explain researchers Tim Searchinger, Anthony LaMantia, and Gordon Douglas.
Indeed, only “massive testing” of the entire U.S. population will allow us to avert “two disastrous and unsustainable scenarios,” they argue.
The first scenario involves essentially shutting down the U.S. economy for perhaps a year or more until a vaccine is developed.
The second scenario involves shutting down the U.S. economy (or major parts of the U.S. economy) intermittently in response to each new outbreak of the virus.
In either scenario, the result would be a severe recession, if not a great depression. And, “even with intermittent isolation,” write the researchers, hospitals likely “would be overwhelmed and many people would die.”
Thus says Gottlieb: “We need widespread testing to know where and to what extent the virus is spreading.”
Physicians, meanwhile, are making innovative, “off-label” use of hydroxychloroquine (an anti-malarial drug) and azithromycin (an antibiotic) to treat COVID-19 patients, and with promising results.
Medical researchers, likewise, are working round-the-clock to develop a vaccine, as clinical trials are underway and moving apace.
“America is home to a vast, dynamic life-science industry,” says Gottlieb. “This is its moment. This is why decades of drug investment and development matter so much.”
The “arsenal of democracy,” moreover, is rapidly retooling to become the healthcare supplier of first resort.
Ventec Life Systems and General Motors, for instance, have teamed up to meet an urgent and unprecedented need for “FDA-cleared Level 1 surgical masks” and “sophisticated, high-quality critical care ventilators.”
“The companies are adding thousands of units of new capacity with a significantly expanded supply chain capable of supporting high volume production. GM is contributing its resources at cost,” the companies announced Friday.
Make no mistake: America was slow to realize the dangers of the coronavirus. We were caught flatfooted and unprepared. We did not realize what was hitting us.
But as Churchill famously said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”
We may not have tried everything else, but we’re certainly doing the right thing—or at least trying mightily to do the right thing. And that matters. That is why America is not yet done. Not by a long shot.
Feature photo credit: Abbott Labs in Temecula, California via Connect Media.