Stop Testing for H1N1?

I agree with Glen.  The other concern I have it that the public is being mislead by media and physicians.  During this spring we had doctor offices' sending patients to the hospital to be tested that didn't even have any symptoms of any sort.  Then the patient are getting upset with the hospital employees for not taking "good" care of them by not testing.  As a laboratory manager I was trying to get all the correct information out to the doctors and hospital staff but alot of them did seem to want to listen and did their "own" thing.

There has been a rush on medical facilities for testing. Even patients who would not otherwise go to the  ED are coming in large numbers from home or private doctors offices. In Georgia the state public health lab as well as the CDC have been inundated with  specimens sent for confirmation.

I am not sure what the rate of confirmed positives is, but I bet most specimens are negative. So, valuable resources in terms of money, time and labor are being consumed inordinately.

H1N1 although pretty bad is in many ways similar to the common garden variety flu and confirmation is more for epidemiological reasons rather than for tailoring specific treatment. Most people confrimed with H1N1 will not react- or be treated -any differently than they would  if they had the regular flu.

I guess I have mixed emotions. For epidemiological reasons it can be important to identify overall incidence, trends, cohorts and so on.  Testing might also provide valuable information to plan strategy for the flu season later this year. For example will H1N1 re-emerge with a vengeance?

On the other hand, I am not sure that at this point wide scale testing ("over testing", really) warrants the use of such valuable, scarce resources.