3 ms·

Rapid tests took long time to reach the market, pandemic was already big when they became available at scale. I also think most people would not agree with gett

• BjoernKW 5y ago
  Rapid tests have been available since autumn last year at least. They're a lot easier and cheaper to produce than vaccines, for example. Producing and supplying them at scale is just a matter of demand. Most countries just didn't bother to buy them early on. It's true that getting tested frequently is invasive, quite literally so. We seem to forget too easily, though, that lockdowns and the civil rights restrictions that come with them are much more invasive (albeit perhaps not that literally in most cases). Yet, we still put up with those. > Track and trace was introduced and failed in most countries. That's because most countries made a half-arsed attempt at best, sometimes hampered by largely imaginary privacy requirements. The main concern with the track & trace apps available in the EU, for example, was to supposedly comply with GDPR and local privacy laws, rather than protecting people from contracting and spreading a disease. This is why these apps were expressly designed to only store data in a decentralised fashion, which effectively kept local health authorities from using that data to do their job. The funny thing is: In terms of GDPR, there of course is nothing that keeps you from storing such data on a server (much less so even, if you're a government agency) as long as you have the user's consent and explicitly state how that data will be used.