About That Pill - part the second

My Lordy! That was quick. Now, I consume the NYT in the dead trees version. Can't do a crossword other than pen/paper, so there's no reason to go just digital. Which means what I found this morning appeared earlier (29 November). Didn't see it. What matters, naturally, is that the piece includes lots of confirming quotes from famous experts.

At times, especially in the summer and fall of 2020, getting tested for the virus has required an hourslong wait in line, followed by a weeklong wait for results.

The real problem, other than cost: is it even possible to get tested with results within the 3 to 5 day window?

In clinical trials, which enrolled only unvaccinated people at high risk for serious disease, Merck's regimen reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by about 30 percent when given within the first five days of symptoms, while Pfizer's cut those risks by 89 percent when given within the first three days of symptoms.

Replicating these results in the real world will require people to act swiftly, perhaps at the first sign of the sniffle.
[my emphasis]

Of course, it helps if testing is easy and rapid:

"In the United Kingdom, you can go to a pharmacy and get a box of seven antigen tests for free," Dr. Bilinski said. "In the U.S., you have to be refreshing Walmart's website to hopefully get BinaxNOW tests during the 15 minutes that they're in stock."

Those Shithole Countries can't do anything right. Right? Here in the grand USofA, however:

"It is not unheard-of for people to have wait times of five days," Dr. Bilinski said. That delay alone could put patients at the edge of the prescription window, even if they got tested the moment they first felt symptoms.

Just as at the beginning of this epic, when test/contact/isolate was the regime of necessity, the USofA just doesn't do the test thing with gusto. I guess that frontier meme still persists in many American lower brain stems. "Can't and won't let the Damn Gummint tell me what to do!"