The workers doing the testing are wearing protective gear, and the patient doesn’t have to leave the vehicle. If people are in their own vehicle, though, it’s much safer. But what we don’t want to see is a bunch of people flocking to a virus-testing center, walking in, and the few that actually have the disease infecting others around them with it. You obviously want to provide other options, of course, because not everyone has a car - let’s get that out of the way first. Yes, but the real benefit isn’t so much the time, it’s the safety of them. That’s faster than a walk-in test, right? Dena Grayson Alex Wardįrom what I can tell, drive-through tests take about 10 to 15 minutes to complete. We want to make sure we detect as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, so that we can isolate them. This virus doesn’t care if you’re a citizen or not, it doesn’t care if you have insurance or not, it doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, black, white, or brown. We don’t want uninsured folks or undocumented immigrants to fear showing up for a test. The testing has to be accessible, yes, but it also needs to be free. What are some of the challenges you foresee with this plan? Dena Grayson So even though it’s late for much of the country, this is an important step to take. Importantly, this will be very effective in places where there’s not a high intensity of infection and we can catch people early. The problem is we’re in a situation where the cat is already out of the bag, and we already have hot zones around the country like Seattle. The virus has been circulating in the country this whole time, and we have had very limited capacity to detect it. Now, I’m unsure why this step wasn’t taken weeks or months ago. If you can’t even detect who’s infected, then you’re done. The key to containing a highly infectious, deadly virus is you have to identify who’s infected, track down all their contacts, and quarantine them. Alex Wardĭoes the president’s drive-through testing plan sound good to you? Dena Grayson Our interview, edited for length and clarity, is below. “Announcing the good measure of drive-through testing is a great start,” she told me, “but it’s only the beginning.” She worked in the private sector on the 2014 Ebola outbreak and was a former Democratic candidate for the US Congress in Florida.Ī critic of much of the Trump administration’s response, she’s mostly behind the president’s announcement. Dena Grayson, a physician and an expert on pandemics. To understand more about the merits of the administration’s drive-through testing plan, I called Dr. New York state has already started such a program in New Rochelle, and now the Trump administration wants to expand drive-through testing across the country. It has conducted 3,600 tests per million people compared to five per million in the U.S.” According to NPR, “South Korea has tested about 250,000 people since its outbreak began on Jan. It’s a process that has worked really well in South Korea to curb the spread of Covid-19, as the disease is formally known. That would allow not only for quicker testing to see if someone is actually infected with the virus, but also safer testing, as the potential victim is more isolated in a vehicle than, say, the waiting room of a doctor’s office. The “goal is for individuals to drive up and be swabbed without having to leave your car,” Trump said, speaking from the Rose Garden. President Donald Trump on Friday announced a new plan to combat the coronavirus outbreak: drive-through testing.
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