Why not have universal testing?

Regarding the local Stamford mandate that all municipal employees either offer proof of vaccination or agree to weekly testing, a mandate similar to countless others around the country, I have a question that I’ve not been able to find an answer to. I thought perhaps that answer may come if asked of a larger audience.

We know that fully vaccinated people can still become infected with, and carry, a serious viral load of COVID-19. We know that these vaccinated people are far less likely to get seriously ill, get hospitalized and/or die. We know that the vaccines likely also reduce the chances that a vaccinated person will be contagious, but we really don’t yet know the degree to which this is true. Early on, breakthroughs were thought to be the rare exception; with the rise of the delta variant, though breakthroughs may yet be a small statistical occurrence, they seem to be almost common. So the science as of now seems pretty clear: vaccinations fall well short of completely eliminating the risk of exposure.

A brief note here: I am fully vaccinated and have been since the earliest opportunity offered me, and I have been wearing masks since the beginning.

But there seems now to be a disconnect: If vaccinated people can indeed contract and spread the virus, why don’t we just test everyone, and do it regularly? Why do we force people who fear the vaccine to prove they don’t have the illness, but not ask the same of the vaccinated? Again, I understand that the odds of infection for a vaccinated person are far lower, but I also understand that those odds are far from zero.

So why are we threatening people’s livelihoods for vaccine non-compliance? How do we explain to them that this threat to their careers is made over an incremental, and shifting, difference between the vaccinated and the nonvaccinated? It just seems arbitrary to me.

In much of Europe, governments have adopted the rapid test as the best way to avoid these issues. With a widely available system of such tests, we could build absolute confidence that everyone at your school or office or stage show or concert is virus-free. The guesswork could be eliminated, and we could finally begin to rebuild our national confidence.

This would be a huge expense and a massive logistical undertaking, for sure. But, frankly, Washington is debating just two bills that together could cost 5 trillion dollars. That’s trillion. If we can seriously consider spending that kind of money on things we want, I think we could find it for something as sorely needed if we are to restore any sense of normalcy to our republic.

Some vaccine resistance comes from ignorance and fear, to be sure. Some comes from a misguided sense of what freedom really means, as if the concept of freedom in America is an absolute. But there are many well-read, thoughtful people, those who watch and read the same news as we do, who delve deeply into the available data, and conclude that they are not yet ready to take the vaccine. We should not make pariahs of them, or at least not until we can confidently say to them that we are rigidly following the science. A policy that says vaccinated people must wear masks indoors but never need a test seems counterintuitive and, well, unscientific. Universal testing, ideally rapid testing, seems to me a far more scientific approach that has the added benefit of eliminating yet one more issue that does little more than divide us.