[PLUG-TALK] Digital testing and innoculation stations

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Fri Nov 20 02:27:02 UTC 2020


Oregon does not have enough medical professionals to do all
the COVID testing (and later, vaccination) that we need.
Mass inoculations, like Oregon did in the late 1950s for
polio, are not practical - we should not gather that many
random strangers in one place at one time. 

See  https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2020/11/oregon-lawmakers-call-on-gov-kate-brown-to-boost-the-states-low-covid-19-testing-rate-immediately.html

https://tinyurl.com/covormed

Home kits are possible, but using them correctly is
unlikely, especially injectables.  Rapid data gathering
and analysis is essential for maximizing results and
catching errors early.  In hours, not days.

A Modest Proposal:

There are many closed restaurants and bars, and laid off
food servers and preparers.   

There are many retired doctors (like my wife) who can
teach and oversee over video links, but don't want to
"leave the bubble" and die.

There also many of us who know how to configure computers.

These are components for victory over COVID.

Imagine ... temporarily converting a thousand shuttered
restaurants in Oregon into testing and inoculation 
stations.  Tarp them off into isolated sections with
makeshift air cleaners (a box fan and a MERV-13 furnace
filter is a good start).  Masks for workers and clients.

Shuttered restaurants with drive-throughs?  Use those
as well.  But winter starts soon, and it is difficult
to find veins on a shivering arm.

Staff the sites with briefly-retrained restaurant staff,
doing simple repetitive tasks, supervised on-site with
quickly-retrained cooks and restaurant managers.  They
understand "clean" and "recipe" and "quality" and "fast";
they know the basics and are 90% trained already.

Teach the rest online.  Teach physical technique in unused
school classrooms or other restaurant sites.  Teach
teachers to teach others.  School teachers will be busy,
too; much of their work will be testing and retesting and
inoculating school children (grubby little germ magnets).

Connect them all with video links over the internet.  
Supervise them with a mix of retired doctors, school
teachers, and army drill instructors (who understand
"do this exactly right or die in battle", and can teach
VERY LOUDLY when required).

Annoying busybody complainers can be trained to watch the
do-ers for small mistakes, enter them into databases, and
STFU otherwise.  Then erase the databases; the possibility
of oversight is enough.

A finite array of "point skills", quickly learned, watched
over and corrected and improved rapidly. 

-----

The "connect them all with video links" would be our part
of the job.  Yes, *US*; plug, free geek, dorkbots, whoever
can install from a CD and bring up single-task-focused
Linux systems on a jumble of mismatched but available used
computer hardware.  Sorting through tens of thousands of
donated computers to build thousands of onsite systems. 
Testing tens of thousands of donated ethernet cables to
connect it all.  Debugging and securing links to data
gathering hubs - which could be some of our own servers,
temporarily "donated to the war effort".

* Rant On *

World War C.  When we win this war in Oregon, hopefully
by late spring, we attack pockets of resistance in the
COVID collaborator states (an info-war, shut off their
propaganda and wipe propaganda servers), then contribute
to testing and inoculating the entire world.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  All vital,
but some of us forgot the first or scrambled the sequence.

On December 7, 1941, the depression-plagued United States
was attacked.  Three years later, the United States
economy was rebuilt and transformed, tens of millions had
new skilled jobs, we had already liberated vast swaths of
the Europe and the Pacific, and achieve global victory in
less than a year.  We were the economic envy of the world
for three decades afterward.

Compared to two formidable warrior states, COVID-19 is a
pussycat.  It is humiliating that we've let it invade and
occupy and murder us, and absurd that we let disease-
spreading COVID collaborators force us to lose battle
after battle.  Our lives, our nation, and all of humanity
require us to vanquish our pandemic enemy, now and forever.

We can do this without mass slaughter of human enemies and
ethnic concentration camps.  We may need limited wartime
"rationing" (people shouldn't queue up to buy toilet paper,
just deliver the damned stuff, or use a bidet bottle), and
we may need to sequester hygiene-resisters in quarantine
camps (plenty of space in North Dakota).  Locked kevlar
collars with loud proximity alarms are probably sufficient.
 
We risk our lives doing this - the disciples of Mammon
(some of whom pretend to be "evangelist Christians") will
continue to lie and cheat and steal and threaten with guns.
We will build new businesses on the ruins of the old, while
they cling to the old and call it "The Economy" and "Jobs".
We don't need their gramophones and horse buggies.

But hey - 75 years after Hitler and Tojo, Germany and Japan
are energetic partisans for world peace.  Former COVID
spreaders will someday bring peace too.  But you can't make
an omelette without protecting the chickens from the wolves.

* Rant Off ... for now *

Ideas and improvements?  

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com



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