Originally Posted by
nomiiiii
Rapid Testing right before taking a flight will absolutely not work and it will become obvious as soon as it is deployed at large scale.
- We will realize that the false negative rate is high, so what's the point.
- More importantly, there will be news stories every day of people or children getting stranded and losing their jobs because their test was positive before their return flight, so they were denied boarding and couldn't get back for that reason.
- There will be lawsuits and a lot of religion/privacy concerns about this procedure around the world
- This will simply make demand for international leisure and business travel at zero, or travelling to attend any crowded event (concerts, sports games etc which are very common reason for people to take a trip). No one will want to take a trip to a sports game if there is a risk that their return flight is denied due to positive test.
This would create an impossibly huge hassle for everyone.
Honestly we would simply have to learn to live with the virus till a vaccine is found, or just choose to crater our economies and not travel at all till then.
I am not saying that we won't see reopening and I am not saying that we wont' see some sort of testing in the future. But, for now, opening will NOT be based on testing. So, what you need is people who are willing to get on a plane because their perception of the overall risk of their getting sick is low enough that they are willing to take that risk. And that does exist, at some level. Until 30 days ago, I took the risk that I would catch malaria, yellow fever, rabies, hep A, hep C and about 1000 other diseases I didn't even pay attention to. So the issue is when enough people will believe that as a combination of: actual chance of getting sick; actual chance of getting badly sick; herd immunity; personal immunity; etc. all mixes together and makes it a background noise (just like the danger of letting an Uber driver take me to the airport).