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Yes there has been a big change in both which is mentioned in my comment. Most countries still do testing for everyone and encourage it, many countries do test

Yes there has been a big change in both which is mentioned in my comment. Most countries still do testing for everyone and encourage it, many countries do tests at schools for children. Sweden is now only testing unvaccinated people that show symptoms and doesn’t do testing for school going children. Our world in data isn’t a good source for anything out of context. Same goes for vaccine coverage you can see countries with 90%> vaccination coverage but a limited scope or eligibility whilst other countries with a far wider eligibility criteria have lower coverage. And with the booster shots things get even more complicated. You can’t compare apples with oranges…

rossdavidh 5y ago
Interesting! Do you know when (about) this change happened? In the U.S. we only do testing (normally) for people who feel symptoms and go to get tested, so the lack of testing for school going children didn't register with me as unusual. Do most European countries require testing for school going children? Looking into this, it appears that Sweden has recently backtracked on that change, so it will be interesting to see what kind of uptick we see in the next week or so! https://news.trust.org/item/20211117120236-6wk93 https://news.trust.org/item/20211117120236-6wk93
- dogma1138 5y ago
  I don’t know about the US, I live in the UK which reports all testing including the at home self reported LF test results. I don’t think that our world in data being a rubbish data source on its own is a new thing (any data source is rubbish without context), even in the beginning of the pandemic you had major discrepancies. Perhaps other than for a short time when everyone was basically doing mass testing during the initial lockdown period around mid 2020 but pretty much since then and especially since the vaccine was rolled out every country has been doing their own thing. Just to put things into perspective for the past month the UK averaged about 900K tests per day, Sweden averaged about 15,000… even if you account for Sweden having about 6.5 times fewer people it’s still a drastic difference. And whilst not everyone went as nuts as the UK, Italy is still doing about half a million tests a day. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-covid-19-tests-per-day?time=2021-10-19..latest&country=GBR~BEL~DNK~FRA~IRL~ITA~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-covid-19-tests-...

rossdavidh 5y ago

Interesting! Do you know when (about) this change happened? In the U.S. we only do testing (normally) for people who feel symptoms and go to get tested, so the lack of testing for school going children didn't register with me as unusual. Do most European countries require testing for school going children? Looking into this, it appears that Sweden has recently backtracked on that change, so it will be interesting to see what kind of uptick we see in the next week or so! https://news.trust.org/item/20211117120236-6wk93 https://news.trust.org/item/20211117120236-6wk93

dogma1138 5y ago
I don’t know about the US, I live in the UK which reports all testing including the at home self reported LF test results. I don’t think that our world in data being a rubbish data source on its own is a new thing (any data source is rubbish without context), even in the beginning of the pandemic you had major discrepancies. Perhaps other than for a short time when everyone was basically doing mass testing during the initial lockdown period around mid 2020 but pretty much since then and especially since the vaccine was rolled out every country has been doing their own thing. Just to put things into perspective for the past month the UK averaged about 900K tests per day, Sweden averaged about 15,000… even if you account for Sweden having about 6.5 times fewer people it’s still a drastic difference. And whilst not everyone went as nuts as the UK, Italy is still doing about half a million tests a day. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-covid-19-tests-per-day?time=2021-10-19..latest&country=GBR~BEL~DNK~FRA~IRL~ITA~SWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-covid-19-tests-...