5 ms·

It is entirely feasible to keep things going on, as long as you have a high enough level of testing (not just people with symptoms) and strong contact tracing.

It is entirely feasible to keep things going on, as long as you have a high enough level of testing (not just people with symptoms) and strong contact tracing. We have neither.

xur17 6y ago
And we don't seem to be making very rapid progress towards having significantly higher levels of testing in most of the US.
- tgb 6y ago
  On top of that, I got tested last month and it took 6 days to get the results, 7 from day of scheduling the appointment. Doesn't matter how many tests we perform if they're rendered nearly-useless by being out-of-date by the time they come back. In fact, I worry about "security theater" use of these that falsely give a sense of confidence.
- makomk 6y ago
  You have higher levels of testing than pretty much any other major country on the planet, from all the figures I've seen. The easiest demonstration is just going to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and sorting by tests per capita. (The UK is similar and Russia is better on paper but their figures have been extremely fishy even by global standards. China's testing seems to be heavily concentrated on high-profile stuff like testing all of Wuhan and Beijing; they've tested less overall, and there's been weird incidents like patients hospitalized with symptoms in a region already known to be a hotspot not getting tested promptly and entirely missing an outbreak elsewhere until it spilled over into Beijing.) The reason you don't seem to be making progress is that no matter how much progress there is, your press has worked very hard to convince you that the necessary level of testing is always much higher than you currently have and you're uniquely failing to achieve it because of Trump. They use techniques like carefully only comparing the amount of testing to countries you're worse than, not comparing overall testing levels at all and instead falsely claiming test positivity levels were a measure of overall testing (by that point it mostly measured infection levels - the number of tests required to test, say, everyone with symptoms is almost entirely unaffected by the number of Covid infections unless you have so many of them your healthcare system is collapsing), and most recently literally using the fact that you've tested more to make it look like you're doing worse: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html For context, the big reason the US has "five times as many cases as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined" is because you've been testing massively more than Europe, Japan and South Korea did during their outbreaks, and people are only counted if they're tested. European testing was particularly bad - from what I could tell, the countries with big outbreaks basically only tested people who were hospitalized, and the much higher test positivity rates and hospitalization and death rates amongst confirmed cases seemed to confirm this. That won't show up so well on more recent overall stats because everyone did plenty of testing after the outbreaks had died down, though still not at US levels. Though with the way European and South Korean cases are picking up that might change. (For bonus points, the other thing that article uses to prove that the US is a unique failure is the length of its outbreak... after everyone had been pushing for "flatten the curve" which literally extends the length of the outbreak.)
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    This isn't correct. Europe has lower test positivity rates than the US. We'd need to conduct 3-5x more tests to have the same number of tests per positive case as Europe.

It is entirely feasible to keep things going on, as long as you have a high enough level of testing (not just people with symptoms) and strong contact tracing. We have neither.

xur17 6y ago

And we don't seem to be making very rapid progress towards having significantly higher levels of testing in most of the US.

tgb 6y ago
On top of that, I got tested last month and it took 6 days to get the results, 7 from day of scheduling the appointment. Doesn't matter how many tests we perform if they're rendered nearly-useless by being out-of-date by the time they come back. In fact, I worry about "security theater" use of these that falsely give a sense of confidence.
makomk 6y ago
You have higher levels of testing than pretty much any other major country on the planet, from all the figures I've seen. The easiest demonstration is just going to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and sorting by tests per capita. (The UK is similar and Russia is better on paper but their figures have been extremely fishy even by global standards. China's testing seems to be heavily concentrated on high-profile stuff like testing all of Wuhan and Beijing; they've tested less overall, and there's been weird incidents like patients hospitalized with symptoms in a region already known to be a hotspot not getting tested promptly and entirely missing an outbreak elsewhere until it spilled over into Beijing.) The reason you don't seem to be making progress is that no matter how much progress there is, your press has worked very hard to convince you that the necessary level of testing is always much higher than you currently have and you're uniquely failing to achieve it because of Trump. They use techniques like carefully only comparing the amount of testing to countries you're worse than, not comparing overall testing levels at all and instead falsely claiming test positivity levels were a measure of overall testing (by that point it mostly measured infection levels - the number of tests required to test, say, everyone with symptoms is almost entirely unaffected by the number of Covid infections unless you have so many of them your healthcare system is collapsing), and most recently literally using the fact that you've tested more to make it look like you're doing worse: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html For context, the big reason the US has "five times as many cases as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined" is because you've been testing massively more than Europe, Japan and South Korea did during their outbreaks, and people are only counted if they're tested. European testing was particularly bad - from what I could tell, the countries with big outbreaks basically only tested people who were hospitalized, and the much higher test positivity rates and hospitalization and death rates amongst confirmed cases seemed to confirm this. That won't show up so well on more recent overall stats because everyone did plenty of testing after the outbreaks had died down, though still not at US levels. Though with the way European and South Korean cases are picking up that might change. (For bonus points, the other thing that article uses to prove that the US is a unique failure is the length of its outbreak... after everyone had been pushing for "flatten the curve" which literally extends the length of the outbreak.)
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  This isn't correct. Europe has lower test positivity rates than the US. We'd need to conduct 3-5x more tests to have the same number of tests per positive case as Europe.