Some Sense on How COVID-19 Testing Should Be Conducted and Why Fauci, Birx and Gottlieb Should Be Immediately Escorted Out of the White House

Elon Musk and Robert Zurbin

Robert Zurbin, an aerospace engineer whose inventions include the nuclear salt-water rocket and co-inventor (with Dana Andrews) of the magnetic sail, writes:

In the face of the current coronavirus pandemic, authorities are taking measures that are having massive negative economic impacts...The most important statistics we need to know to develop a strategy to deal with the situation are the size of the pandemic and its lethality. Current data provides no basis for accurate estimation of these vital metrics...

To get the right answer, we need to random-test the public. We don’t need to test all 327 million citizens — although, when feasible, that would be very desirable for the purpose of identifying immune individuals and putting them back to work. For the purpose of getting a rough estimate of the size of the infected population, we need to random-test only about 1,000 people nationwide. That is the approximate size of most election polls, and, provided that reasonable care is taken to ensure that the sample is representative of the electorate, such polls can generally predict the outcome within plus or minus 3 percent. It’s true that occasionally a 45 percent–polling underdog can pull off an upset victory, but never a 20 percenter, let alone a 1 percenter.  Limited polls might not always predict the winner, but they inevitably show who is in the competitive range. For purposes of quantifying the epidemic, that would be an enormously valuable correction to our current state of ignorance.

This is the same point I have made over and over since this absurd nutball erratic testing has been going on:

[A]nyone who mentions "confirmed coronavirus cases" is signaling they do not know what they are talking about...

 This is not how you would run a scientific experiment to understand what is going on with a virus in the general public. 

For that, all that would be required is testing a sample of the general public. That way you catch those that are without symptoms but more than that you get a very good sense of how the number of cases relates to the total population overall and, over time, whether it is going up or down etc.

You can use the basic methodology of polling firms to get small population samples for understanding the virus profile in the general population. This would actually tell us something.

The current method of testing does none of this. 

The current improperly designed testing is the government medical bureaucracy's answer to the Kabuki theatre displayed by the TSA.

But the real question is, why aren't top Trump advisers such as Tony Fauci, Deborah Birx and Scott Gottlieb making this point?

Either they are incompetent and don't understand testing fundamentals or they have an agenda that is different from finding out the truth. Either way, they should be escorted out of the White House immediately.


-RW