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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 soun

by 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.
    - m0zg 6y ago
      > 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.

by m0zg 6y ago

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.
  - m0zg 6y ago
    > 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.