Many countries struggle with insufficient testing capabilities. Meanwhile, in Switzerland, hospitals and labs say that they could be doing many more tests with their newly bought machinery but are not allowed to. Because the government does not want to loosen the restrictive testing criteria back from the time when we did not have enough tests.
This is mind-boggling.
I can’t believe that there isn’t a big outcry in the Swiss media because of this.
A friend of my sister has had pneumonia for weeks and it is strongly suspected he has COVID-19, yet is not being tested, because he is otherwise young and healthy and does not meet testing criteria. He is trying to isolate from his family with 3 young children in their flat while the mother is going insane with work. Why are they not allowed to test him? I understand they do not want to test every hypochondriac with a sore throat, but at least they should be testing everyone with a non-bacterial pneumonia.
These things just make me uneasy. From the start I had the impression that the government was withholding information and I think they still do. Either they have a reason to believe that it is useful to keep these tests for later (because they expect a second, higher spike in cases?), or they are trying to hide something, or they are just incompetent, I don’t know.
I don’t necessarily believe that our government is more incompetent or lying to us more than other governments, but one of the creepiest things about this whole pandemics is this feeling of being manipulated. I remember well the government official that told us that this is “just like the flu” at the end of February or beginning of March, and I am sure this was a deliberate lie to keep us from doing things like hoarding or avoiding restaurants and thus damaging the economy.
zinemin's random thoughts 