As a child who repeatedly got tonsillitis several times a year, sometimes when totally isolated and sometimes later hearing everyone else around me also got a sore throat, I grew up confused as to why contagious disease tracking was a problem we’d given up on and accepted. No doctor was ever curious of the specific virus or bacteria which caused it. While no one case greatly affected my life, as a whole they very much did. Then again, I was also struck by the possibly false realization that many STDs which have followed us for thousands of years could be permanently wiped out by a couple weeks of global abstinence.
Might we begin to have an intersection of low cost, widely-available tests for every strain of most every contagious agent along with a belief that contagions running amok in civilization is not an unchangeable reality after all this? These at-home DNA tests will soon hit a critical mass of data to link together a global family tree of every human—a previously unthinkable reality that’ll suddenly become possible. I’m ready for such a critical mass in contagion tracking that makes a light bulb go off in our collective heads that contagion no longer be an essential part of civilization. Feel slightly sick or have been around someone coughing? We mailed you an envelope of 6 paper swabs for the back of your tongue that’ll change color when exposed to the viruses we’re aware are circulating in your area.
Learning that a specific RSV strain overwhelmed a daycare and infected 6 babies because my cough I got on a trip to a hotel upstate was cleaned by a chambermaid who got it from… would strongly alter my belief about the inevitability of even minor contagions in the same way the person to person tracking and quarantining of Coronavirus cases is radically altering our social and hygiene landscape right now. Even if widespread testing only shook the “people just get sick for a couple weeks once or twice a year; it happens” attitude of inevitability, it’d be worth it for that alone once it was economically feasible.
As a child who repeatedly got tonsillitis several times a year, sometimes when totally isolated and sometimes later hearing everyone else around me also got a sore throat, I grew up confused as to why contagious disease tracking was a problem we’d given up on and accepted. No doctor was ever curious of the specific virus or bacteria which caused it. While no one case greatly affected my life, as a whole they very much did. Then again, I was also struck by the possibly false realization that many STDs which have followed us for thousands of years could be permanently wiped out by a couple weeks of global abstinence.
Might we begin to have an intersection of low cost, widely-available tests for every strain of most every contagious agent along with a belief that contagions running amok in civilization is not an unchangeable reality after all this? These at-home DNA tests will soon hit a critical mass of data to link together a global family tree of every human—a previously unthinkable reality that’ll suddenly become possible. I’m ready for such a critical mass in contagion tracking that makes a light bulb go off in our collective heads that contagion no longer be an essential part of civilization. Feel slightly sick or have been around someone coughing? We mailed you an envelope of 6 paper swabs for the back of your tongue that’ll change color when exposed to the viruses we’re aware are circulating in your area.
Learning that a specific RSV strain overwhelmed a daycare and infected 6 babies because my cough I got on a trip to a hotel upstate was cleaned by a chambermaid who got it from… would strongly alter my belief about the inevitability of even minor contagions in the same way the person to person tracking and quarantining of Coronavirus cases is radically altering our social and hygiene landscape right now. Even if widespread testing only shook the “people just get sick for a couple weeks once or twice a year; it happens” attitude of inevitability, it’d be worth it for that alone once it was economically feasible.