I heard a lot of bluster about testing here in Ontario in the spring, but here we are in the fall with rationing of tests again.

Or at least I hope so.

There's no way (AFAICT) to link to it directly, but try charting "Total tests completed in the last day" and "Under Investigation": https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/status-of-covid-19-cases-in-...

I think the "military involved" piece is key, especially if you're talking about the US. It's maybe a bit trite at this point, but a lot of comparisons were made about the stark contrast in how quickly a national response mobilized in response to BLM protests vs the pandemic. The basic takeaway being: executive priorities matter, and even Trump has made it clear on a number of occasions that getting the vaccine out is important to him.

Re: Waterloo region, I work at Google Waterloo, so although I don't live in KW (I'm in rural Flamborough) most of my coworkers do. I had one who showed up at 7am to get a test, lineups were around several blocks and they shut the whole thing down because people were getting rude. He then had to wait a bit and drive to Guelph. People were driving out from Toronto to London, Woodstock, etc. to get tests.

In our industry if we provisioned data centres or server instances like this, we'd be in a bit of trouble, no?

EDIT: FWIW I have a political leaning and bias towards a strong public sector and am a big believer in public service. I'm not one of those "government can't do anything right" and "less government is better" types. But I do think that several decades of "government can't do anything right" people being a dominant cultural and political force now means that government can no longer do anything right. We're losing our ability to act collectively :-(

History isn't always happy and positive, you know.

Oh, they are. Just don't ask too many questions about money disappearing in the darker corners of such effort.