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A comment on What's the point of a Covid-19 test that takes 19 days for results?. Parent comment

Re:What's the point of a Covid-19 test that takes 19 days fo... by joshuamorton on Saturday July 25, 2020 @07:55PM (#23953285)
Daily testing numbers aren't really important except as they compare to daily new cases. Countries that have already controlled the spread of Covid (many Asian nations, NZ, a lo of Europe at this point) don't need to do many tests because they have few cases. And on that metric, the US is doing worse than all of Europe and all of Asia except maybe Japan.

We sit just between Nigeria and India, but well ahead of Brazil and Mexico.

More concretely, 0.5% of the tests in Germany, the UK, and Italy are positive. For us, between 8 and 9% are positive. So to do the same level of testing per-case, we need to do 15x as many tests as we have been.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-daily-tests-vs-d...

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Re:What's the point of a Covid-19 test that takes 19 days fo... by m0zg on Saturday July 25, 2020 @08:17PM (#23953392)
If they "aren't important", we should shut down testing. The "new cases" will drop like a rock then. /s
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Re:What's the point of a Covid-19 test that takes 19 days fo... by joshuamorton on Saturday July 25, 2020 @08:27PM (#23953436)
That was Trump's original plan, yes.

The point is that as a nation we don't get brownie points for handling the outbreak so badly that we need to do things that other nations do not.

No one but the US (or Brazil or India, perhaps) has any business having the most tests per day, and few other nations have the need for a significant number of tests per capita, because cases per capita are so low that it's not worth it.

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Re:What's the point of a Covid-19 test that takes 19 days fo... by m0zg on Saturday July 25, 2020 @09:04PM (#23953617)
> That was Trump's original plan, yes.

That's why I have to qualify my sarcasm with /s on this site, including my post above: the population density is too high. /s Trump sarcastically suggested it, but there never was such a "plan". Nor could there be one: the president of the United States does not have the authority to shut down (mostly private) testing.

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