I give the solution’s basis right here at the start, in case you only have time or patience to read a bit.
UPDATE NOTE: I still agree with everything I wrote here in this essay, so I leave it as it was, but there is a better cheaper easier test now invented and ready to produce. In these shorter subsequent blog posts (Linked just here below) I explain what it is. Even if these hopefully successful newly announced vaccines turn out to be long lasting enough to be a solution and become simpler enough to distribute to all the people globally. This incredibly simple and cheap to mass produce for universal daily home testing for just the contagious form of the virus, would go a big way in enabling us to shut down the virus at root from spreading each day. A ready way to shut down the virus not our vital fellow society.
Here are links to the 4x subsequent update blogs I added to this public essay:
(the 1st is the most recent)
“Cheap, frequent COVID tests could be ‘akin to vaccine,” professor says
Here is the original essay, which besides the update in the form of testing to the simpler self administered free daily Contagious Test talked about in the newer links above, I still agree with everything else I expressed in this public essay below, that I wrote and published first. Thanks for taking a look and reading, if in fact you are!!
The practical way, to shut this pandemic down permanently and allow the full re-opening of society, removing the need for all the social limits and restrictions, is for the state to mass produce something like the rapid Covid-19 compact portable Testing Device. Its ‘low-complexity protocol’ could be made into a simple and clear routine, for adults in every family or otherwise to operate at home, allowing everyone to easily test daily for Covid-19 each day.
(People, able to be together freely, at Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin, March 17th 2016 – by Antonio Carty)
These devices have been developed by Hiber-Gene, an Irish medical device company. I have absolutely no connection with them. I was looking for a device, that would allow easy enough daily home testing for everyone and was happy to find there was such a device, that could easily be adapted to home testing. This small portable device and its Covid-19 test application, has already been tested and approved by Dublin’s Mater Hospital. Proven to be 97% accurate. Its ready to produce and be made simple for home use. It happens to be an Irish owned company, but that’s not what matters. I’m sure other countries industries could produce a device similar if they decide to, or could work with Hiber-Gene, to learn how to produce their design as quickly as possible. Any technology, vaccine or cure must be made into ‘open license’ with fair compensation to its inventors and developers, so every country can hurry to help mass produce it and save lives, getting solutions done is what’s important, obstructive profiteering and secrecy of knowledge in a health pandemic is obviously a crime against humanity.
This testing device, already has a ‘low-complexity sample preparation protocol’ but it would need to be even better realised for everyone to use at home, through easy instructions tailored for simple step by step use, so each family and person can get used to using it relaxed within their daily routine. As well as been more convenient, it is safer to test at home, among a fixed group or on your own, than in going to public test places where many other people who ‘think they’ve got it’, will want to be tested also. Small group or single use testing is much easier to keep sterile and controlled. Testing at home is really the best and cheapest way for everyone to daily shine a clear light on this virus and its regular use will soon drive this deadly virus out of our society, by leaving it nowhere to hide, fester and infect further. Also these testing devices can be used to perform the tests for other virus, including new ones if they emerge in the future.
These devices can be mass produced quickly if given extraordinary help from the state to facilitate the extra manufacturing needed to scale up their rate of production. If we can have one of these small devices in every home, then every family and person in the state can conveniently test themselves and family members each day. Freely provided by the state for the sake of the common good. The device can test 4x people at a time, using just a sample of saliva, it only takes 30mins to deliver a positive result and an hour to find a negative result. Its 97% accurate in discovering medium to late developing infections. It can also do an additional test, that will better discover if you have early stage infection, as accurate as in a hospital test. Basically its enough, because if you get a positive result you ring hospital and are seen and tested again and treated and isolated from population while you are cared for professionally and hopefully helped to recover. If you get a negative result you’re clear to go out safe and confident. This can be made an untroubled part of our daily routines, it can become a silent habit like brushing your teeth before you go to bed, or in the morning.
Now think logically what this effort will quickly achieve. The sick will be diagnosed within a day or so of becoming infected. The full level of infections and their locations in the country will become known. Quickly the pandemic will be shut down with nowhere to go. It can only live in us. Home testing will be a sea breaker, as it continues to discover isolate and break down any returning pandemic waves, if practiced nation wide and even globally, it would of course keep a spotlight on, continuing to discover every new infection, leaving the virus no more hosts and so we shut the virus out perpetually. Allowing all of us to know each morning if we don’t have the virus, so we can soon safely and confidently enjoy life in an open unrestricted society, on the whole daily assured to be free of infection.
The elderly and those with vulnerable conditions will be reliably freed from this indefinite and unacceptable future limbo of ‘Cocooning’, disintegrated from company with loved ones and their general opportunity of a life within society. We could all meet, work, have a drink, embrace without having to risk playing a game of chance with each others lives. With just this daily routine we can end the pandemic now quickly and regain control of our health and society, without the need to wait for a cure or vaccine, if ever someday they hopefully are possible. If the world adopts this solution, then an open global society, with the ability to travel, socialise, work and create economy can commence again at least without pandemic restrictions.
The ‘Track & Trace smartphone APP’ is reactive not preventative. Its trying to play catch up to little to late, especially given the World Health Organisation has told us the big unfortunate truth, that an infected person may be most infectious to spread the virus to others before they ever even show symptoms. “All of the best evidence suggests that people without symptoms can and do readily spread SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. In fact, some evidence suggests that people may be most infectious in the days before they become symptomatic — that is, in the pre-symptomatic phase when they feel well, have no symptoms, but may be shedding substantial amounts of virus.” So tracking and tracing only after a person finally gets sick enough to call a doctor or hospital, because they’re finally sure they need a test and treatment, its way to late. When the next surge or wave rises or spikes, there will be an impossible amount of variables in contacts to trace for each person getting infected who may have been freely spreading the virus for up to 14 days before they realised they have it. The Track & Trace App during an infection increase, will be like trying to bail out a boat with a cup as it leaks faster than you can bail. But with convenient daily home testing for Covid-19 the hull of the boat itself gets fixed, very soon the virus will have no one to live in without been discovered, it inevitably gets shut out and continues to be shut out and found out, where ever it appears each day.
Lets fix the boat and allow society to embrace freely again. A cure and vaccine will be great ‘if’ ever they can be eventually discovered and become possible to produce, but with full daily home testing we can assuredly end the pandemic now and regain a real safety and control. Our society and economy can recover confidence and escape the pathetic need for this social and economic disintegration, restriction and recession. Our decent, into a growing economic uncertainty whilst also suffering a sad social disintegration with fear of the virus in each other, can be ended. All the lives that will be lost to future waves can be saved, if we produce and work this solution.
A good rule of thumb going forward, should be to not follow leaders who regard humanity as a ‘herd’ and who think they can forecast the science on a new virus through their presumptions, instead of wanting to discover and respect that particular novel virus’s own actual working realities.
The feckless assumption by many in leadership, like the British Tory’s, that this virus would become weaker anyway as we develop ‘Herd Immunity’ has so far not been proven by the results. A survey in Spain published in Lancet found, that of Spanish people who survived Covid 19, only 5% developed any sort of antibodies to the virus and the longest any of their antibodies remained working in a body was 4 months, therefore even these 5% can still get re-infected after 4 months. So immunity and resistance are not developing enough naturally. A vaccine might succeed in boosting our natural ability to fight the virus, but it may just be a false hope ‘gold rush’ where big profits are already been made on speculation, but real working results are not soon or maybe ever achieved. ‘Letting it Burn Through The Herd’ will not just callously result in the virus killing everyone it can, but in the next wave it will get a chance to kill all over again anyway.
The pandemic is just lodging deeper into nations who’s leadership presumed to let it in, get it over with, to hurry up ‘Burn through the Herd’ so it would accelerate their advance to ‘Herd Immunity’ for the sake of getting back to the economy. Natural antibodies are not occurring much, or remaining long enough in those few who develop them after they recover from an infection. So getting it , to get it over with, does not advance us through the crises and you may spread it to someone who won’t survive it even if you do this time. Regardless of an eventual success in the big vaccine hunt, it will still take at least years to wear the new virus down to safe levels even with a possible vaccine success. So many deaths will occur over years, going blindly over the trenches to face the virus, to win the maybe impossible victory of ‘herd immunity’.
Even the more responsible politer governments are now assuming that a Slow ‘Burn through the Herd’ is the best that can be hoped for. So through restrictions they plan on just slowing down, an inevitable spreading of the infection through us all. It is shown with full intensive care treatment more people with serious cases of Covid-19 can get to survive it, but if hospitals are overwhelmed to fast they wont be able to offer that intensive care to those that desperately need it. In the Lancet surveys implications it says “At present, herd immunity is difficult to achieve without accepting the collateral damage of many deaths in the susceptible population and overburdening of health systems”.
But even succeeding in slowing infection rates down, still means that everyone the virus will be able to kill, will eventually get infected and have to risk facing it. A government’s best hope here, is only, that with a slow burn, there will at least be a capacity in the hospital system for people to best be treated and hopefully try survive it.
But this eventual infection is not a necessary gauntlet, that people should ever have to face, because with the provision and practice of daily home testing, we all get to shine a constant light on the virus, wherever it is manifesting and shut it down perpetually, leaving it nowhere to live, forcing the virus into an effective extinction. We don’t need to keep catching this virus and fighting for our life or death with it each year. This virus should never have crossed over into us, we can shut it and other viruses out perpetually with simple daily testing. There are multitudes more viruses in the animal world even worse for us than this one, should we let them also plague us if they manage to make the leap? We can shut viruses out, by shining a daily light on them when they cross over like Covid-19 has, by so doing we will not allow them to gain us as their hosts. Daily testing is the best ‘new normal’ to accept, it will end the pandemic and soon after the need for restrictions. The ‘New Normal’ must now be a safer, healthier and more considerate future for life on Earth. The foundation of all.
Hoping for eventual ‘Herd Immunity’ to develop, is the most catastrophic and dumb way to survive a virus. While also hobbling and disintegrating our society and economy through restrictions that can only hope to slow the virus down, not prevent it. Free use by everyone of convenient daily home testing, can shut this pandemic out perpetually. We must also make sure we train, employ and create more than enough permanent intensive care staff and beds for the remaining numbers who have caught it, until new infections are squeezed down to as close to zero as we can get. Garanteed health care all can use freely, has become a vital common interest as well as a good thing for our common humanity.
This pandemic has laid bare truths, the foundation of our survival is supported not by profits, but peoples health, without first our health their is no working society, so no economy or profits. The propaganda of wealthy news media is telling us we must forget the pandemic now and work their economy again, hoping for an at best slower polite ‘burn through the herd’. But free daily home testing is the practical root way to actually shut down all the deadly viruses that occur, waiting for possible herd immunities to develop over years of suffering and losses will soon wipe us out, as more and more viruses come to feast on our wasteful ignorant practice of letting them in to ravage until they’ve killed all they can, while we try to maintain profits before the lives that make them. Doing nothing and denying the pandemic exists is the worst thing, but also, this slower burn through the herd, accepting the virus will kill, but having restrictions to just slow those killings down, so hospitals at least are not overwhelmed, is just a slightly more polite descent into an accumulating disaster of our deaths and disintegration that does not need to occur.
Many people are already ignoring wearing masks and only sort of following restrictions, and especially when we drink we remove inhibitions, and lets face it, we don’t want restrictions and everyone in masks, society needs empathy and more integration not disintegration, we rightly want all this to end, but in absence of any real solution its essential to wear masks and act with respect for the life of others especially the vulnerable. But restrictions are only a fig leaf, they are only slowing it down. Many people are also of course sick of lock-down and restrictions, we all are, so in the face of no real solution or foreseeable end to restriction, and if they expect they’re fit enough to survive the virus, they are deciding consciously or unconsciously to just risk getting it so they can socialise and work freely, they are presuming like Boris Johnson that once they get it, it will be over with for them and they will be immune, this is not true and even if they recover for now, they will be helping to spread it to all the vulnerable people they meet who may not survive the first infection.
But we can end the need for all this disintegration. Lets work smart and with the grain. Restrictions only half followed create huge leaks. Playing ‘Track & Trace’ up to 14 days back is to late, ‘The APP’ is a sinking catch up strategy, that in a surge will be overwhelmed. Cocooning indefinitely for elderly and vulnerable is inhumane. With a convenient daily testing routine, using a device in every person’s home, the pandemic is discovered at root each day and quickly runs out of hosts to blindly infect in the ‘pre symptomatic phase’, once daily home testing becomes routine we and our society can soon be assured enough to stay open and unrestricted, we could meet, play, embrace, travel, work and be together again in real safety, now and on into a future with confidence.
Hard times and emergency’s so often bring out and ascend the best in us, but as it goes on indefinitely, the strands of constructive hope and patience get baffled and slowly depressed as fresh waves, spikes and surges will break out and as the economy crashes repeatedly, down toward unknown depths. Fear and desperation in real hard times can also descend us to know the worst in ourselves and each other. Lets stop uncertainty and its demoralising descent now, by making this effort to mass produce a practical solution to the entire pandemic. Our society, our economy, exclusion, injustice, wars and our sustainable global climate balance have big problems, that needed urgent fixing before Covid 19. We must solve this pandemic now before it exacerbates and overwhelms us and our ability to discover and handle all our other fundamental problems.
Hopefully through this pandemic our unequal world has collectively realised some sort of globally shared awareness that the true reality of our survival, is founded firstly before all else, on the protection of the health and welfare of all. Even the wealthy are not safe behind attempts at walls and privileges, the biological pandemic can only be controlled with universal actions that protect everyone. This pandemic is an inescapable wake up call, a global revolution of down to Earth reality, that usurps rigged reality’s and priviledged truths returning us to our fundamental foundations of essential survival, which are an egalitarian reality, our ‘New Normal’ now in fact turns out to be the old cheer “One for all, All for one”, because without the health and welfare of each and everyone of our fellow humanity, this pandemic can not be controlled and ended. We must work together, providing support for all of us in this crises and that relationship, then also leads the need to solve all other crises our dangerously unequal and environmentally collapsing world together must face and solve now, for the long run.
Now just in the nick of time, this global pandemic must in fact become the wake up call that empowers us as citizens of the planet to see the danger, to turn our titanic civilisation’s course from certain collision. Short term profits is driving our course blindly, bending democratic leaders to its interests, but profit has no responsibility, it is an irresponsible child only interested in short term gain, it relies on society like a parent, ‘to big to fail’ when it crashes. But it is We the People who must not fail, because without the foundation of a safe healthy society for people, able to live and work together safely, there can be no economy and profits anyway. The life of the environment and people’s health are unarguably the true foundation of everything.
A free uncontrolled drive for only short term profits has been dangerously usurping our best democratic interests in equity and survival. This year has been the warmest globally for millions of years, warmer than last years temperatures, which were the warmest until this year beat that record for worse. Such profound records are becoming familiar. But let that sink in. International best science is alerting us to the reality that if we do not reverse fossil fuel emissions within 12 years time, they will become irreversible and our climate balance, in which we slowly evolved for millions of years, will be pushed off its rails. We will suffer a beginning of our mass extinction, food supply will fail, with more and more desperate wars and inhumanities manifesting, as resources dwindle and brake us up, into the doom of heavily armed warring power blocks.
But their is hope in waking up to reality, and this pandemic forced us into a rapid global time out, a natural revolution has usurped the working reality of our global system, we have had a retreat which allows reflection and perspective, we see the machine can stop in a couple weeks if it must, that it is our tool and we can change its course and workings if it threatens our health and the future for life on Earth. The fragility and vulnerability of our health and that of others, is having a sobering shared experience. We have had joy in seeing the environment begin springing back, nature is an eternal optimist, always looking for rebirth and so we see it can recover if we allow it to, the solutions are becoming apparent to us, if we care to believe in the dignity of our own collective wits and power of conscience, to commit our democracy to fix it.
Fortunately the real answers are actually good and fair ones, Only through free access to healthcare for everyone, can we treat and control a global pandemic. Only through ending poverty and desperation can their be better practice in animal farming and human living, so animal diseases do not get such big opportunity’s to manifest unchecked terrible crossovers that infect us all, its emerging this caused the manifestation of Covid-19’s ability to spread into the world’s human population. Only through good stewardship can we preserve our earth’s climate balance and room for all the natural living systems to be sustainably hosted in it, only by such long term responsibility can we protect a living future for our coming generations on earth. Our beautiful irreplaceable world, who’s living nature is always optimistic and trying to teach, only through love and understanding of all life, we can best understand and hope to evolve with this planet on which we depend. All the mysteries nature has written with its spirit for life, we must awaken to, and protect a future possible and worth living together with!
Social disintegration is not an answer that we can or should bear for long, we must fix our ship, and learn to sail it on a better course. We want to, we need to and we can shut this pandemic down fully, and open our society up again soon after, with out a descent into disintegration and economic collapse, if we produce these convenient home testing devices, for everyone to check and know each day as soon as possible if they need help, or if they are uninfected and free to go out safely, into an unrestricted open society for themselves and others.
People are tired of the pandemic, we all want to meet and have a drink and be free to embrace, we’re not going to keep to the restrictions, and its a good human spirit in us that wants to embrace without restrictions, so lets work with the grain of how we are and what we realistically can expect people to keep to, after the unsustainable lock-downs ended new cases are increasing again, even if people keep to disintegration and restriction, a slow ‘Burn through Herd’ still means everyone eventually must face this deadly virus. But it doesn’t need to go that way.
We want and need a real end to this pandemic now. Daily home testing will run this pandemic out and end our descent into disintegration and constant loss of lives to the deadly virus. The Irish government is starting to introduce weekly testing in refugee direct provision centres and meat factories in some counties, so they would have to agree that regular testing brings real control.
Daily testing, by everyone conveniently and safely in their own home, is the full answer, only kept waiting for wise and confident governments, with the care and ambition to fulfill it.
Trump gets to act like he’s heroic and unafraid of catching this virus, why? Because he gets tested daily, so he knows each day he’s safe or will as soon as possible be treated if he catches it. He’s got real reason to feel safe, but like most silver spooners, he cares not to afford his privileges to his fellow citizens, in fact he campaigns to limit the testing he is protected by. Daily testing makes him safe and daily testing for everyone will of course make us all safe.
We can fix the hull of our boat and shut the virus out of all our lives, while also ending the need for restrictions. By producing these small portable testing devices, we can each day, safely and reliably practice a routine of convenient home testing. Regaining our wonderful open society. Where we can congregate, make sense together, embrace and know each other. We needed integration not disintegration. Pubs and restaurants, places where society can meet are closing down. Lets get this done and end this global pandemic, from been the straw that breaks our civilisation’s already overburdened back. We can instead close down the pandemic with this practical solution, and through the necessary participation of each of us, in daily solving it, we will be activating a global bond of practical responsibility together. We must evolve beyond the false cages and illusory protections of our national borders, into facing the true reality of our global humanities struggle to maintain survival of life on Earth. There is reason for hope, but only through a respect for our shared interest of life, health and a peaceful sustainable future, can we harness a common ability to overcome all our now unavoidable global problems. With respect for the health, dignity and justice of each and every one and other, we can succeed peacefully together.
So friend,
if you agree with achieving Free Daily Home Testing, the basis of this solution, please get it heard.
Spread the word!
(People, able to be together freely, at Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin, March 17th 2016 – by Antonio Carty)
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