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Comment by cheriot | Hacker News Reader

This would be HUGE. Not only has the testing capacity in America been maxed out, but the % of positive results has been more than 20% and trending upward. In order to quarantine effectively (read: end the shut down) we need to test the family, coworkers, and contacts of every positive result.

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Testing has been ramping up https://covidtracking.com/data/us-daily

It's plateaued and has been hovering around 100k per day for 2 weeks (outside California clearing its backlog on 4/4). The White House promised 27M by 3/31 and we were at 1M. It doesn't look like it's ramping up.

I WA we were doing around 7k-8k tests/day 2 weeks back, now its between 4-5k

That's where I've been getting data. We have a long way to go.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Y9_ZrMBhhVLg2xQHtBCc...

Why do you state that our testing capacity has been maxed out? My understanding is that factors like the availability of swabs and the availability of medical personnel to administer tests are a bigger bottleneck than qPCR machines.

I don't have any insight into the why. Only that the growth rate in tests per day has slowed to an almost stagnant level.

At least anecdotally, it doesn’t seem that we’re hitting our full testing potential. I think adding in a new technique would only exacerbate the mismatch between test supply and test utilization.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01068-3

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