So... what's up with the testing? -rant-
I’ve been keeping up with the news and current events. I haven’t heard shit about COVID testing. I’ve heard it mentioned... but I haven’t seen any action.
I haven’t heard anything about increasing our capacity to test people, building a bigger and better infrastructure for testing, increasing the capacity of the supply chain, and making sure the vast majority, if not absolutely everybody, has access to get tested. NOTHING!
This stupid saying of “the cure can’t be worse than the problem” is bullshit. The cure to the problem has always been testing people. The cure in January was testing people; the cure in February was testing people; the cure in March was testing people.
You want people to feel safe engaging with society?Test everybody. You want the economy to go back to normal? Test everybody. Republicans, you wanna stop “giving handouts”? Test everybody. Republicans, you want to be “liberated”? USE YOUR POWER TO DO WHATEVER IS NECESSARY TO TEST EVERYONE!
USE YOUR POWER!!! FLEX YOUR MUSCLES!!! If companies want future contracts, have them invest to increase output. Give them money, grants, whatever to increase output. This is the time to use all of our industrial might!
Assuming we have an adequate supply chain... if you want children to go back to school, they have to be tested. If people want to go back to work, they have to be tested. If restaurants want to open, they have to verify with the health authority that all of their employees have been tested. Any company receiving government grants, loans, contracts, anything, they have to verify that everyone’s been tested.
IF THIS ISNT AN “ALL BOOTS ON THE GROUND” OCCASION, I DONT KNOW WHAT IS! If a single person in government believes otherwise, they don’t want to govern. If you don’t want to govern, please step out of the way and let the adults lead.
= new reply since forum marked as read
So here are some data, to make up for the obvious shortfall:
Unadjusted for population. In some instances, tests that come back negative aren't included in the total, or the count is "people" not "tests" (so one person, 5 tests might get reported as "5" or as "1"
:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-total-tests-for-covid-19
Adjusted for population: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing
Sometimes the charts aren't self contained. So just looking at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-tests-per-thousand left me confused--what units are on the y-axis? But on the page where that particular graph is embedded the ancillary text says
This chart shows the number of daily tests per thousand people. Because the number of tests is often volatile from day to day, we show the figures as a three-day rolling average.
What is counted as a test?
The number of tests does not refer to the same in each country – one difference is that some countries report the number of people tested, while others report the number of tests (which can be higher if the same person is tested more than once). And other countries report their testing data in a way that leaves it unclear what the test count refers to exactly.
We indicate the differences in the chart and explain them in detail in our accompanying source descriptions.
Gotta read the large print.
