Sorry for lost of your uncle.I agree with you on the vaccine. but instant result testing is not necessary and would be very expensive for a virus with a 99.7% survival rate. What we need to do is open the country back up while distributing the vaccine (ready in a few weeks) and protecting people with compromised immune systems due to other medical conditions. But those people should also be protected from the annual flu, common colds, infections, and bug bites. Funny, but we don't shut the economy and mask up for any of those things that kill people every year.
Testing is a waste of time unless like she suggested, we each do it several times a day. However antibody testing (which we have now, but many flaws) would be more advantageous because it would tell us people who are already immune to Covid. There are plenty of people who had it (I may be one of them) and thought it was something else. Those people could walk around freely, with no masks, and never have to worry about anything. They can't catch it, and they can't give you something they never caught.
Another point, the death rate in the USA for 2020 is on par with the last several years, there has been no spike in the overall death rate due to covid, even though many non covid deaths have been coded as covid. Pay hospitals extra for covid deaths and guess what, you get a lot of covid death certificates.
I read quite a bit about it, and was slightly skeptical until that happened in my very own family. My Uncle died last month from colon cancer. He was 94. When he made his final arrival to the hospital, he tested positive. He couldn't walk and never went anywhere. He was living with his son while ill, and nobody near him had it. On his last day at home, about a dozen people came by to say their likely last goodbyes. None of them caught this highly infectious virus either.
My cousins came by for a visit a few weeks ago, and my one them showed me his fathers death certificate on his phone. Covid. Not that he was 94, not that he had cancer for months. Covid.
What I didn't know until they stopped over is his father could barely communicate. But he died heartbroken. This WWII combat vet told his son to tell everybody in the room with him that day how sorry he was for what he did to them, and begged their forgiveness. A few weeks after his death, he got a call from the VA asking how they thought their treatment of his father was. My cousin told him the treatment was fine...... but!!!!!!!
The doctor he spoke with told him to join the long list of families who had the same complaint about their loved one being labeled as a Covid death.
In the case of your uncle, there appears to be two factors in his death, colon cancer and covid-19. Whether his death was attributed to colon cancer or covid-19 depends on a chain events that leads up to the death. On a death certificate under cause of death, the first line is the immediate cause; that is the final condition that resulted in death. This typically is something like Escherichia coli sepsis, acute renal failure, hypoxemia, etc. The second line in the death certificate is underlying cause of death; that is, the disease or injury that initiated the chain of events leading directly to the immediate cause of death. This could be Covid 19 or Colon Cancer. What is listed as underlying cause depends the chain of event between the underlying cause and the immediate cause. These events are in the medical records. In other words, there will almost always be a clear chain events that links the underlying cause to to immediate cause. There are very few instances where there is any real guess work in the cause death, although fairly rare it does happen. The events that lead up to a covid19 death are typical very different from those that lead up to a colon cancer death. A person dying due to covid-19 will almost always die with very enlarged lungs filled with fluid. A person dying of colon cancer will have a very different chain of events depending the phase of the cancer.