By Arnold Weinstein
In the era of COVID-19, we are learning that scientific diagnosis is harder than we thought. Do we focus on symptoms? Do we use swabs or will a spit sample suffice? How long must we wait for results? How many of these tests are available? And are they actually reliable? And reliable for how long? For the past many months, and doubtless for the foreseeable future as well, all of this seems terribly vexed, yielding little clarity or certainty. This pandemic has been a crash course in uncertainties.
Such questions camouflage the grimmer and more urgent threats now visible. What fuels the anxiety-filled diagnostic project is a pandemic’s core terror: the prospect that you might infect me, and that I might die, or cause someone else to. After all, diagnosis is a sedate analytic procedure, but potential death is something else: it is what fuels, darkens, and exacerbates our
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