The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working on a mail-in test for COVID-19 that could be available in the next two weeks. When I learned this from a news summary here, my first thought was: why would this mail-in test be restricted by zip code? Why provide this, the safest way to test (without having to go into a health care environment and risk infection) to only a select few? Why not provide it to everyone?
According to this article in the Washington Post, these mail-in kits will be scaled up by the Gates Foundation if they are clinically valid.
We all need COVID-19 testing now. As a health care worker myself in private practice and also working part-time at a psychiatric hospital, I find it bizarre that there are not more people screaming about the need to test health care workers. For all we know, health care workers could be some of the worst spreaders of this illness. We can’t tell, because we’re not testing them. That just doesn’t make sense.
For these reasons and more, we decided to start a petition urging the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to step into the breach and make this a defining moment for their foundation by providing mail-in COVID testing nationally.
Please sign the petition here. Petitions are being directed to email media@gatesfoundation.org, should you want to send a separate note with your own words about the need for COVID testing to be made as widely available as possible. We already have close to 100 signatures. The more signatures, the more messages being conveyed to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that they have an opportunity as one of our leading health care foundations to do their part to address the COVID-19 pandemic.
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