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Comment by cgb223 | Hacker News Reader

> In the US, we're now doing significant amounts of testing, but we're still primarily testing only those with severe symptoms

Its not a significant amount of testing if we're only testing those with severe symptoms

Here in SF at least there are scores of people I know who all were sick with a "weird flu" at some point from February to now who would all kill for a test to show that they have COVID immunity. These are people who could potentially go back into society and do more work / enjoy their lives instead of being shuttered inside with anxiety

It is currently _IMPOSSIBLE_ to get any kind of test to prove that

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Go do the Stanford drive-through blood antibody tests. It takes five minutes it’s free and they do it for everybody.

Do you need any kind of doctors order for that or health insurance?

Like how does it work? Would love to go do that

  it’s free and they do it for everybody

Do you have details on how to take advantage of this? Their website says nothing to to that effect:

https://med.stanford.edu/covid19.html

Only way I know to get any COVID19 antibody test is through this study https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04334954?term=serosur... and the result may be inconclusive or take months.

This is weird to hear because there are several competing clinics in Phoenix all offering antibody testing.

> These are people who could potentially go back into society

Do we know this for sure? I've read that we're seeing re-infections of people who previously had it, but it wasn't clear exactly what was happening.

we don't. he is (perhaps unknowingly) spreading disinformation, but that's really very normal behavior.

the hardest thing about this is finding real information and then accepting it.

Accusing someone of “spreading disinformation”

Is a pretty hard line to take when all the facts are evolving and we’re learning more every day

We're about as confident that people gain long-lasting immunity as we are that it's a simple respiratory tract infection. It's not beyond question, but to raise the questions without mentioning that we're pretty confident in the consensus answers is either misinformed or misleading.

For some people any statement which is not their preferred taste of doom, disaster and panic is considered misinformation. The post they are complaining about doesn’t even supply a concrete statement:

> These are people who could potentially go back into society

Nobody knows if they could go back or not but the statement that they might is somehow the most dangerous form of misinformation.

The US is doing a significant amount of testing compared to what's available almost anywhere else on the planet. I think Germany is still beating them, but they're basically the only large country that is at this point. Journalists here in the UK have actually been pointing to the US as one of the examples that proves we're the ones failing at testing for a while now.

Where are you getting that data? The 'Our World in Data' site says reporting is inconsistent, but the data they do have shows per-capita Germany, Italy, Belgium, and Austria doing more than the US, and France, the UK, and the Netherlands doing less.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-cumulative-tota...

(I'm using cumulative because the daily numbers are missing for Germany, France, and the Netherlands)

It's certainly possible other countries have passed the US since I last looked, the exact leaderboard does seem to vary depending on things like which country is hitting the biggest roadblocks in their test rollout right now. (Though Italy's lead in total per-capita tests is mainly because they were the first Western country to have their outbreak hit catastrophic levels and they ramped up testing fairly aggressively early on in response to that. I presume their testing wasn't so great prior to the collapse of their healthcare system, since they went from reporting only three cases to disaster alarmingly quickly.)

Are you using some metric other than "per-capita" for tests? I could understand something like "per-positive case", but it's unclear from your comments.

I ask because the data I have shows the US solidly in the middle for the big EU countries over the past month (Germany and France don't show up on the daily graphs)

- Italy started earliest, but the daily per-capita tests have been higher every day except Apr 4: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...

- Austria, Czechia, and Portugal have been higher than the US more often than not: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...

- Belgium is on par; the UK & the Netherlands are definitely worse: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-daily-covid-19-...

It depends on where you draw the line for "large", but the US is really not doing all that great (though it has caught up significantly over the last month): https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Drawing the line at ~5M inhabitants, the following countries/territories have conducted more tests per million population than the US: The UAE, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Austria, Hong Kong, Australia, Spain, New Zealand, Israel, Czechia, Singapore, Canada, Belgium, South Korea, and Russia.

The U.S. has more resources per capita at its disposal, but if everyone is starting at zero tests, I'd still expect smaller countries to be able to ramp faster relative to their population, and all the countries you've listed are indeed smaller than the U.S.

There's the old adage "nine women can't make a baby in a month". Sometimes there are real-world limits to scaling, and the U.S. does have an incredible amount of tests to create.

Yeah. One big reason I'm not counting small countries (that is, anyone much smaller than Germany) is that there's a limited global supply of pretty much every consumable you need to test for coronavirus, and smaller wealthy countries can get a major boost in per-capita testing by just buying up more of the supply. So there's a whole bunch of smaller countries with really substantial per-capita testing advantages over all the larger ones.

I'm not expecting the US to rise to the lofty levels of the Faeroe Islands, but it seems to me that you're grading on an excessively lenient curve here. Germany is the 19th most populous country in the world, and of the top 19, only 3 are bona fide first world countries (the US, Japan, and Germany) , and even one of the marginal candidates (Russia) is beating the US in tests.

And it's not like Portugal, Italy, Spain, or the Czech Republic are particularly small or particularly wealthy.

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