A COVID-19 Solution

And why it won't happen

Today the United States recorded its 190,000th COVID-19 death.

It’s maddening.

We can see that other countries have handled this far better. And the happy chat about how hospitalizations are going down rings awfully hollow. There are hundreds of people dying every day. Pretty hard to rebut that.

The frustration is that it doesn’t seem to be getting better. You wonder if people are reaching the point where they think, maybe this is just the way things are going to be for the next six or nine months.

Which is a depressing thought.

But wait, it gets worse.

In The New Yorker last week, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and a public health researcher, laid out a common sense plan to curb the Coronavirus — without a miracle cure or a national lockdown. Gawande even singles out a coastal town out west for special commendation. That’s right, San Francisco.

Understand, this is not another appeal to wear your mask. Nor is it a debate about how safe a vaccine has to be before it is offered to the public.

You should, of course, wear a mask. It is helpful. But at this point everyone has gotten the message. Anyone not wearing a mask is making a statement and should be regarded as doing so.

And you know the problem with vaccines. Labs are basically inventing something out of thin air with the hope that what they come up with will knock out this new pandemic.

That’s the advantage of Gawande’s plan. The technology already exists and we know it is safe and effective. All we have to do is to scale up production . . . massively.

At its core, Gawande’s plan is simple. Much, much more testing. And, equally important, much, much quicker results.

“To fix testing we have to accelerate two lines of operation,” he wrote. “Test collection and test processing.”

This is where San Francisco came in for praise. Testing has stalled elsewhere with questions about paying — does insurance cover it? — and the availability of testing.

San Francisco set up big drive-through testing facilities — Pier 30-32 was one — and the test was free, paid for by the city. Of the COVID tests administered in the city, two-thirds were from CityTestSF. So well done.

(And, in a perfect encapsulation of the San Francisco ethos, on the day the city was being praised for common sense in a national publication, over 1,000 partying Burning Man revelers held a unsocially-distanced mini-festival on Ocean Beach. Oh, San Francisco.)

Although San Francisco tests were returned relatively quickly, in the big picture Gawande is thinking of much quicker turnaround — at least to the Standard of England or South Korea, where results are back in 48 hours.

Gawande wants to step up “point-of-care” testing, which are both cheap and quick. He says the White House uses a point of care testing and that some versions of the test can have a result in 45 minutes.

In the case of classrooms, Gawande suggests “pool testing.” Once it has been established that students are not positive on the first day of school, further tests could be combined. All the student samples would put together and tested as one. If there were no positives, the whole class is clear.

That’s the real pathway to opening up the country. With regular testing and quick results, we’d spot virus-carriers quickly and get them away from others. But you’d also have the confidence to know that you tested negative and so did others around you.

Of course none of this has a snowball’s chance of happening.

The irony is that, as vehement as President Trump is about holding down testing, it is actually what would open the country back up. It would work for him. But the phrase that keeps coming up about Trump is he is “unwilling or unable” to see the logic in changing his mind.

We know how this will go. Trump will bluster and push and will try to get a vaccine out before it is ready or sufficiently tested.

And then his anti-vax followers will refuse to take it.

Maddening.

Remember when kale was really hot? A thing? Well now (looks both ways) it is newsletters. Yep. And to sign up just hit the button.

Bart train has made a few stops

I kinda like Joey Bart, the budding phenom catcher for the Giants. The team hyped him like crazy when they drafted him. And then they praised him lavishly for his performance in the minors.

But this year, when the Big League roster was set, Bart was sent to Sacramento to training camp. Finally, after hearing it from several sports columnists, the Giants brought him up to the big club three weeks ago.

As I wrote in my Sunday Press Democrat column, Bart has mostly been good. But he has had a few blips. In an interview he discussed the game when he and Johnny Cueto were not on the same page.

To his credit, Bart not only answered the questions, he shed some light on what was going on behind the scenes.

He’s had his ups and downs, but when he does something like almost throw out a runner at second from one knee, it feels like even when he’s just making the average plays there’s some spark there. We will see.

What? You’d like to share this newsletter? Well, OK, if you really want to. Just click on the button.

A championship season for the 49ers

I’m not saying they are going back to the Super Bowl. But I think there are some pretty compelling reasons why this should be an excellent year for the Faithful. Deep in the playoffs and maybe even the Big Dance again.

I wrote about a few of the positive signs in my 49ers blog for the Press Democrat. For starters, this has been a weird pre-season, with no off-season training camps, or even face to face interviews with draft choices.

I would say this is the worst possible time for an NFL team to bring in a new coaching staff to attempt to install an entirely new system. The 49ers, with 18 of 22 Super Bowl starters returning, per the Chronicle, have stability on their side.

I would also say that honking for the local team is not usually my style. But this is one of those gut feelings.

Funny story. Way back in the 80s when I was hired at the Chronicle, we had a veteran columnist named Art Rosenbaum. Nice guy, but he shamelessly played the home team angle. He picked the A’s and the Giants to win the World Series before every season so he could lay on the I-told-you-so’s if they won.