4 ms·

> Unless you are in a risk group, the test doesn’t really make a difference. If the test is positive, you can self-quarantine and notify everyone you've been i

> Unless you are in a risk group, the test doesn’t really make a difference. If the test is positive, you can self-quarantine and notify everyone you've been in contact with that they need testing. Then any one of those people that tests positive can do the same thing, etc. etc. If you don't do any testing, you end up with a bunch of positive but asymptomatic carriers wandering around unknowingly infecting other people. South Korea is taking this approach and they seem to be doing a lot better than most other countries.

tim333 7y ago
Indeed and it probably makes much of the difference why active cases in Korea have kind of leveled off while in Europe they are growing about 25%/day. And just a reminder that's 800x a month.
- paul_f 7y ago
  Is it possible for the number of cases counted to go up simply because more testing is occurring, while the number of people with the virus has leveled off?
atoav 7y ago
Jup, but they are already at their test capacity so they already need to priorize who is beeing tested. So unless you have the lab infrastructure in place already (I don't know how it is in Japan), you can't really invent it out of thin air in the midst of a crisis. The truth is that neoliberal ideology all around the globe did its best to make hospitals and health systems "more economic" by cutting (at the time) unneeded capacities, without any real concern about the resillience of the system as a whole. This is (aside from timing and culture) where you see the main difference between nations today. This is e.g. why Spain decided the privatization of their hospitals was a grave mistake.
fragmede 7y ago
Thank you! There is a HUGE cost to "shelter-in-place". People's businesses and jobs depend on customers going out and using their services, and without customers, they won't have jobs, business will fail, and people will get hurt, and die. (Hopefully fewer now that Trump's doing a bail out.) Shelter-in-place may be the right thing to do, now that that containment has failed, because people will get hurt and die otherwise, but containment wasn't doomed to failure from the start. It's wrong to frame it that way. It's like running for the bus. You don't have to run as fast as a bus can possibly, you only have to run fast enough to catch it before it leaves the bus stop. Containment isn't supposed to last forever, it lasts as long as it lasts. It absolutely required far more aggressive action to be successful, and one of those was testing. Which we dropped the ball on.

tim333 7y ago

Indeed and it probably makes much of the difference why active cases in Korea have kind of leveled off while in Europe they are growing about 25%/day. And just a reminder that's 800x a month.

paul_f 7y ago
Is it possible for the number of cases counted to go up simply because more testing is occurring, while the number of people with the virus has leveled off?

atoav 7y ago

Jup, but they are already at their test capacity so they already need to priorize who is beeing tested. So unless you have the lab infrastructure in place already (I don't know how it is in Japan), you can't really invent it out of thin air in the midst of a crisis. The truth is that neoliberal ideology all around the globe did its best to make hospitals and health systems "more economic" by cutting (at the time) unneeded capacities, without any real concern about the resillience of the system as a whole. This is (aside from timing and culture) where you see the main difference between nations today. This is e.g. why Spain decided the privatization of their hospitals was a grave mistake.

fragmede 7y ago

Thank you! There is a HUGE cost to "shelter-in-place". People's businesses and jobs depend on customers going out and using their services, and without customers, they won't have jobs, business will fail, and people will get hurt, and die. (Hopefully fewer now that Trump's doing a bail out.) Shelter-in-place may be the right thing to do, now that that containment has failed, because people will get hurt and die otherwise, but containment wasn't doomed to failure from the start. It's wrong to frame it that way. It's like running for the bus. You don't have to run as fast as a bus can possibly, you only have to run fast enough to catch it before it leaves the bus stop. Containment isn't supposed to last forever, it lasts as long as it lasts. It absolutely required far more aggressive action to be successful, and one of those was testing. Which we dropped the ball on.