PCR tests should be widely performed

I have one of the alumni from the same medical school in a city nearby. He is much younger than me. I don't have personal acquaintance with him. He has been actively working for the patients with and those suspected of COVID19 at his office and has regularly shown up in mass media. His efforts as an infection specialist is highly respected by many people, including myself.

He announced in the twitter that he would introduce the PCR measuring equipment to his office and start to perform the PCR test for Sars CoV2 by himself and a colleague. It is all because the government won't be willing to increase the number of the test to cover possible cases in the clinical setting. The minister of MHLW and the head of the advisory council have clearly told they would restrict the cases to be tested for only those with symptoms. 

What the authority thinks of for this outbreak is that COVID19 is generally a self limiting mild infection with low mortality rate in our country. Running the economy is much more important for them than to make diagnosis at early stage or for the asymptomatic cases. Identifying asymptomatic cases, which comprises more than half of the cases, would be a burden, economical and practical, to medical care system in their point of view. 

Such an administrative attitude toward this infection is wrong in multiple ways.

Firstly, it is a kind of practicing herd immunity theory as the public administration. It would not be evident if it is achievable or not. If it should be realized in the pragmatic administration, it would cost a lot of victims and frequent lock down, generalized or localized in our country, which results in more economic loss in the society. From medical point of view, it is noted the immunological memory should be hardly obtained in actual infection as well. The history as for how the governments like that in UK or in Sweden, which started aiming at the herd immunity, have acted for the past several months shows it is almost impossible to achieve it at present. 

Applying generalized PCR tests in the society, especially for those of essential workers or for those working to people in face to face, should be alpha and omega to deal with this problematic new virus. There is, however, an erratic saying or a fake in our society that PCR test would cause a lot of false positive cases so that it is not good to widely implement the test among people. It is what the authority, intending to keep the test cases lowered in number in the beginning of the fight against COVID19, would spread among people especially through the internet. PCR tests has been proved highly specific. The specificity is exponentially defined. If the test employs n pieces of genes, the specificity is related with one in 4 to the power of n-th. If the false positive is questioned in certain cases, it is always due to contamination in the test process but not a defect of this testing procedure itself. 

Some of them who speak ill of this test would say it is too costly to test all suspicious cases. But if they take the method of pooling specimens, it would cost only a few dollars per a specimen. It won't be too costly at all. Considering the possibility the economy undergoes smoldering wax and wane for a long time, it could cost much more than that for the test.

Without wide spread use of the PCR testing, this outbreak won't be controlled. I would like to approve what that doctor is going to do at his office despite of much economic as well as contagious issues.