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> No amount of budget-boosting would be enough to keep up with exponential growth. Right now it would take an atomic mushroom cloud and/or the military in the

> No amount of budget-boosting would be enough to keep up with exponential growth. Right now it would take an atomic mushroom cloud and/or the military in the streets to keep people at home for an extended period of time. And even then we would see 3-6 weeks of exponential rise in case numbers because testing is just so far behind and you will have tons of follow-up cases.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
m0zg 6y ago
Yeah, 161K per million and 53.2 million tests is "so far behind". You should diversify your news intake at this point. The United States is well on track to becoming the most tested large country in the world, and its testing rate is already the highest among large countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-people-smoothed-7-day https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-...
- DangitBobby 6y ago
  This discussion thread is in response to an article called "What's the point of Covid-19 test that takes 19 days for results?" If the contents are to be believed, that seems pretty far behind to me...
  - m0zg 6y ago
    The title makes it sound like a significant fraction of them are taking this long, which is simply not true. The article takes a few anecdotes and makes it sound like it's like that in every case. Then the article predictably shits on Trump, whose (verifiably true) statements that the US leads the world in testing throughput at the moment it is unable to refute with facts, so it uses the aforementioned anecdotes to make it seem like this doesn't matter, tacking on a few more anecdotes and opinions towards the end. This is why the press is not trustworthy.
    - DangitBobby 6y ago
      It seems that for non-proirity cases, Quest is saying that it now takes 7 days or more for results to come in. This is ~125k of the daily tests performed in the US. Of course, based on this information alone, there's no telling how other labs are doing on test result turnaround times. I will also say, for what it's worth, that personally when I was tested a few days ago it took less than 24 hours to get results, and I doubt I was a priority case. But I also didn't go to a federally funded testing site. 1.https://newsroom.questdiagnostics.com/COVIDTestingUpdates https://newsroom.questdiagnostics.com/COVIDTestingUpdates
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      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-daily-new-confirmed-cases https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-daily-tests-vs-d...
      - m0zg 6y ago
        If they "aren't important", we should shut down testing. The "new cases" will drop like a rock then. /s
        joshuamorton 6y ago
        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.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

m0zg 6y ago

Yeah, 161K per million and 53.2 million tests is "so far behind". You should diversify your news intake at this point. The United States is well on track to becoming the most tested large country in the world, and its testing rate is already the highest among large countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-people-smoothed-7-day https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-...

DangitBobby 6y ago
This discussion thread is in response to an article called "What's the point of Covid-19 test that takes 19 days for results?" If the contents are to be believed, that seems pretty far behind to me...
- m0zg 6y ago
  The title makes it sound like a significant fraction of them are taking this long, which is simply not true. The article takes a few anecdotes and makes it sound like it's like that in every case. Then the article predictably shits on Trump, whose (verifiably true) statements that the US leads the world in testing throughput at the moment it is unable to refute with facts, so it uses the aforementioned anecdotes to make it seem like this doesn't matter, tacking on a few more anecdotes and opinions towards the end. This is why the press is not trustworthy.
  - DangitBobby 6y ago
    It seems that for non-proirity cases, Quest is saying that it now takes 7 days or more for results to come in. This is ~125k of the daily tests performed in the US. Of course, based on this information alone, there's no telling how other labs are doing on test result turnaround times. I will also say, for what it's worth, that personally when I was tested a few days ago it took less than 24 hours to get results, and I doubt I was a priority case. But I also didn't go to a federally funded testing site. 1.https://newsroom.questdiagnostics.com/COVIDTestingUpdates https://newsroom.questdiagnostics.com/COVIDTestingUpdates
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    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-daily-new-confirmed-cases https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-daily-tests-vs-d...
    - m0zg 6y ago
      If they "aren't important", we should shut down testing. The "new cases" will drop like a rock then. /s
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        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.