Thursday, March 19, 2020

Scientific Briefing

They say the first step toward knowledge is knowing what you don't know. But from there, you have to take another step. Maybe someone is taking those steps, but how will we ever know, if no one knows? Okay, sure, we know that many people around the world are working on treatment of the COVID-19 illness and a vaccine against the virus. But we have no idea how bad it is now, how bad it will get, or whether it will get worse or better, because we still haven't unknotted the testing problems. The test the rest of the world is using did not go through US testing standards, but those standards could have been waived some time ago, especially since other nations have plenty of data on its real-world use. But no, instead we have to assume that everyone and anyone has the virus. This comic is from Randall Munroe at xkcd.

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