Thanks, I hadn't known about that. It looks like this advice about tests was given on March 16? My city had already shut down by then due to outbreak.

Yes, unfortunately, as all UN parts, the WHO is a consensus organ, at the barycenter of individual countries' participating scientists... meanwhile, in countries or cities better connected with their experts, or just with better experts, the reaction is better and faster.

The exact quote was: "We have a simple message for all countries: test, test, test."

This doesn't sound like a good advice. It's not actionable. We don't have enough capacity to test more. If we could test a billion people tomorrow, we would already do it.

My fav useless tweet from WHO is "there's no evidence human human transmission". I mean, if you don't know for sure, then let's not announce it.

I don't think it was ignored, it just wasn't possible in most places.

As far as I know, most countries are ramping their testing facilities as fast as possible, some are just more effective or had a head start.

'As many tests as possible' is useless advice. Imagine if GDPR said companies should make data as secure as possible or NHTSA said make cars as safe as possible.

No it's a good advice. Because then that would have raised soon an acute awareness about asymptomatic bearers (e.g. through testing a representative sample of the general population), and thus awareness of the necessity of early lockdown.

Also, being able to test anybody who asks it would have dismissed arbitrary criteria that are pushed by governments around the world to minimize the illness. For example in the country where I am, it was until recently difficult to get tested unlike there was an established contact with a tested positive person.

I agree tests are useful, however the advice was not specific enough. The WHO should have specified how many tests are needed for various outcomes, offered early modeling, and facilitated information exchange to improve those models. Instead they simply played politics and offered very generalized and non-specific advice which overwhelmingly downplayed the risk.

Maybe a country has 1000 tests on hand, they test that first 1k people and can say they followed the WHO's advice. That's all that was possible given their immediate stock.