OUR PROBLEM IS OUR HEALTH SYSTEM AND, SOMETIMES, EXPERTS TOO

IT is a given that in order to increase our capacity for getting a picture of the extent of the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 ( Covid- 19), mass testing has to be done.

But we have been hearing scientists, experts and knowledgeable people say that rapid testing kits are not foolproof in that they can give you false results. Even the more sophisticated tests have their limitations. We are also told that each test kit, rapid or otherwise, will cost an arm and a leg. People believe and think that these tests should be free. They are not. Even if people may not be paying for their tests, someone else is paying for them. We all do through our taxes, through our Philippine Health Insurance Corp. ( Philhealth) contributions, the increase for which many do not want to pay.

Mass testing is expensive. In order to do this, the government will have to spend a huge amount of money, and experts say there are no perfect tests. Rapid tests may produce false positives or negatives. On the other hand, the more sophisticated and advanced testing protocols would take a while to get the results and are also not entirely free of limitations. Mass testing, under ideal conditions, will have to be done on a huge sample of our population, preferably a representative sample. And considering that test results are just temporary indications of the state of one’s health at the time they are conducted — since there is always the risk of being infected right after a test is taken — this should be repeated periodically. This would translate to millions of people getting tested every 14 days or even less.

We can just imagine the stress this would exact on our public coffers. This will cost billions. And yet, many people want them for free. And worse, many turn livid at the thought of parting with 3 percent of their monthly salary to pay their Philhealth premiums.

This may sound unpopular. But I don’t think fighting this virus rests on mass testing alone. I also do not buy the argument that flattening the curve is dependent on mass testing. What mass testing will give us is data. But it is uncomfortable to think that the purpose of spending billions on test kits even on uninfected or less vulnerable people is for our experts to have numbers to graph and analyze.

Experts are scientists, unless they are just pretending. In a not-so-perfect world, science may not have the luxury of complete information, that it finds itself operating on and making sense of empirical data that is generated from ongoing events. This is where social scientists become very useful. After all, human behavior is contextual, inter-textual and inter-subjective.

It has been four months since we had our first Covid-19 and two months since enhanced community quarantine was imposed.

By this time, almost everyone is already conscious of the virus, what it does and what we should do. Others may be recalcitrant and obstinate, but there are more people who are cooperative and obedient.

We have limited resources. We cannot advocate for mass testing the way we want it to be done, ideally, but a more systematic and efficient way is a must. But certainly, it is safe to assume that areas with low cases, or with few or even no new cases, is a good scientific indicator of the level of infection in the population. It is empirical evidence. And people who may be walking asymptomatic carriers may already have infected others that turned symptomatic and have been already caught by the system.

We do not need to spend billions on testing uninfected people just to give them, and us, some peace of mind. What should give us peace of mind is an efficient health bureaucracy and a world-class health system. And that is where our taxes should go. In the face of limited resources, it would be wiser to spend those billions in improving our health system’s capacity to respond to the present and future pandemics. We have the best health care professionals in the world that we even export them. But their talents require corresponding support by providing them with world-class facilities, equipment and salaries that they deserve.

It is also important to invest in science and to increase support for research and development. However, even a robust investment in science doesn’t inoculate us from other problems, some of which ironically are created by scientists and experts themselves.

One of the bothersome anomalies emanating from experts during extreme events such as this Covid-19 pandemic is their tendency to mobilize their biases to inflate the importance of their fields and disciplines, even to the point of spinning science and sensationalizing the truth. This may not be fake news. But it is nevertheless misleading and distorting, which is technically still propaganda. Most are done not by scientists but by science journalists. But others are done with their consent, with some actively involved in propagating biases, or spinning their findings to acquire a sense of novelty, or urgency, or importance. Science is driven by the existence of problems, and nothing can pump up the adrenaline for discovery and invention than the existence of a disruptive episode such as a pandemic. And here lies the temptation to succumb to fame-seeking. In fact, the label “expert” ends up getting abused. But the problem is not just about pseudo- scientists becoming instant experts by just googling. It is also about real science misrepresenting itself.

In the end, the key is still prevention. Let us all become active agents in fighting this virus. Let us frequently wash our hands, wear face masks, practice physical distancing, and remain critical of our government and its officials as they preside over making our personal health a matter for their public decisions.