Covid-19 Testing Games: The Survivor Edition

The taping of ‘Survivor’ is on hold, but America’s testing nightmare isn’t.

The Trump administration’s dangerous centralization of hospital data and asking the states to figure out testing policies on their own are leaving many Americans to fend for themselves when it comes to accessing reliable and affordable Covid-19 tests, months into the pandemic.

When I woke up one morning with symptoms similar to Covid-19 in May, my doctor in California recommended a do-it-yourself blood testing kit from a questionable company. When I called them, I found out they shared their number with another business. That didn’t inspire a lot of confidence, let alone their ability to reliably test if I had Coronavirus.

It did not make sense to me then how administering a blood test in your own home, using a YouTube tutorial, would help anyone. How can I, my doctor or the national healthcare officials ensure reliability of these types of tests, make educated decisions based on this information and control the spread across the country? 

Back in March, I reported on the challenges of accessing Covid-19 testing for Fortune. I talked to experts, government officials, and many hospital workers. A lot of them were alarmed and had more questions than answers.

Two months since the article was published, my personal experience showed little had changed. It did not make sense why one of the most dangerous, unpredictable viruses in decades was still treated like a DIY Pinterest project.

It’s July now, but we still have not reached a place where reliable testing is widely available for everyone.

And half way through 2020, the U.S. president’s recurring argument about testing is to do less of it.

“If we didn’t do testing — instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing, we would have half the cases,” Trump said in his remarks in the Rose Garden on July 14. “If we did another — you cut that in half, we would have, yet again, half of that.”

It’s a PR solution to a healthcare problem, notes Dr. Dena Grayson, a biotechnology executive and expert on infectious diseases.

“This is really alarming, you can’t spin death,” she says, noting testing is a part of a series of critical steps where the U.S. is lagging right now. “We’re not doing step zero (masks), we have no federal tracing.”

Still, the administration’s spokesmen say that testing is on track. 

"We know that in areas of the country right now that have appropriate mitigation, that the testing we have is sufficient,” the assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services told NPR. “We know right now that the testing we have is dense enough that we can detect very sensitively where there's going to be a problem.”

A study conducted by NPR with Harvard Global Health Institute found that at least 1 million tests a day were needed to combat the virus, compared to 700,000 tests a day now.

It’s fair to say that the messaging and numbers coming out of this administration have been far from consistent since the start of the outbreak.

Misinformation and lack of transparency are not the only reasons to be concerned.

The global experience of taming Covid-19 showed us that testing is an essential part of getting the virus under control. If we can’t get the testing part right, we’ll likely mess up the next steps too when the vaccine will become available. Processing time is also an important factor in mitigating the spread across the country.

With more businesses opening offices and discussing testing entire buildings as Axios reported, America is following a more fragmented, decentralized testing approach than the rest of the world. We’re leaving it up to the private sector and the local officials to figure it out. We are guided by wrong priorities, marketing and PR, not veracity of the data and how it can be helpful in mitigating the spread.

With the White House now politicizing and centralizing control of the Covid-19 hospital data, as the New York Times reported on July 14, we’re entering a new, more dangerous phase of misinformation. The administration wants the hospitals to bypass the CDC and send them “daily data reports on testing, capacity and utilization, and patient flows,” according to the memo.

It’s unclear how Department of Health and Human Services will gather, monitor or share this data with the public. If the New York Times journalists had to sue the CDC to get access to Covid-19 data before, now the press and the public will have even more obstacles in acquiring an accurate view of what is going on in real time.

Essentially, the U.S. is still in a Covid-19 freefall with each person, business and state providing for themselves when it comes to testing.

In California, the state is turning to testing in tiers and pools, still focusing on individuals showing symptoms or high-risk industries like retail or manufacturing.

The CBS broadcast network pushed the taping of Survivor due to the new testing guidelines. But the real-life Survivor drama directed by this White House is showing no signs of slowing down, in which we are challenged to “outwit - outplay - outlast” the federal government every day.