Lord Kelvin got it right

 William Thomson, in later life dubbed Lord Kelvin, was perhaps the most noted scientist of his time.  True, he did say "X-rays are a hoax" and that both radio and aircraft will be impossibilities, but he was known as a physicist, not a futurist.   What he did say about measurement became the motto for the Hewlett-Packard Company for four decades, before it really thought much about computers.

Some notable and pertinent Lord Kelvin quotes:

As I was graduating from college, I needed a job (with two kids, I couldn't figure out why they called it a Bachelor's Degree).  My advisor, Carver Mead, said, "You're good in the lab, you ought to consider a small company named Hewlett-Packard.   They build instruments for engineers, and that's pretty neat because an instrument has to be three times faster or more accurate than the thing you're working on in order to get a valid measurement.  Thus, instrument designers get to be not only at the 'state of the art' but well ahead of it."

Turns out he was right.   Turns out it was yet a small company--I was their 98th engineer in 1962.  In 1982, as Corporate Engineering Director, I had 15,000 engineers reporting either directly or indirectly to me.   We'd grown some in 20 years.   In fact, from 1962 through 1998, HP was in fact the fastest growing US corporation in the Fortune 2000, hard as that might be to believe.

But it still, mostly, operated as a small company, or rather, a cluster of small companies each organized with their own Profit and Loss statement, replete with their own R&D, marketing, and manufacturing teams.   And, yes, in order to be a good or great instrumentation designer, you had to know a lot of things that no university teaches.   There are no degrees in instrumentation design.   What mattered was a generalist's view of science and engineering, and then domain specialization in medical or chemical or aeronautical or astronomical fields in order to understand and design appropriate solutions.

Which is why it is so distressing to watch the charade about Covid-19 testing.   What farcical actions by a host of groups--the CDC, the Feds, many of the States, and certainly the 'test manufacturers'.  Mygawd, amateur hour.   And because of it, we've probably endured three times as many deaths as would otherwise have been expected.

If you cannot measure, you cannot improve.   Simple