Is all the testing commercial, or is there a government programme too? And if there’s a government programme, do the public have to pay for those tests?
I feel ashamed to be English. So many people commenting here seem to think that there is no such thing as science. I am 57; it didn’t seem like this when I was younger, it seems to have happened in the 2000s onward. I don’t understand where such ignorance came from. I suppose it must be born of suspicion, because of distortion in the media to justify the wars for oil in the Middle East, and the grotesque imbalance of wealth. Though I should add, a few of those grotesquely rich people are Russians!
I’m rambling. The denial of science makes no sense to me; I can’t imagine how the deniers explain technology to themselves. Technology has advanced almost beyond recognition in my lifetime, so someone must be researching to achieve the advances upon which this is based. It is surreal; I can sit here at home exchanging text with you, a Russian in Russia, and we can exchange our experiences of the pandemic. From the perspective of my youth, that would have been unthinkable, both technically and politically, yet here we are, our computers communicating by a shared protocol that is fully published, nothing secret about it at all. Yet to my compatriots that is not even a mystery, it is apparently just another product, something they don’t need to think about because it is just something they buy, and therefore they expect it to work, without any thought or involvement from them… Have they no curiosity? I couldn’t be satisfied to think I was surrounded by a sort of commercial magic.
My government can’t make tests, it can’t even make masks. If it wasn’t so arrogant and aggressive, it could simply ask to buy some from Russia; instead it sends the samples to the USA to get them tested there! Yet my nearest town is Chelmsford where Marconi made radios, I live just three miles from were the first scheduled public radio transmissions were broadcast, from a wooden shed in Writtle. It has been moved to a museum a few miles away, but I know where it was and when people visit me I take them to the site. Radio! which has done so much to connect all humanity! Yet I am disconnected from people right next to me by their ignorance of science; many seem to think I must be either an agent of an international conspiracy, or so feeble minded that I’ll believe everything the politicians tell me on television. At least I know how the damn television works.
Bless you Tatyana, for being a friend across these thousands of miles.