SFchronicle seems to be doing a good job with infographic:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Checklist-for-Ba...
Actually, I see NY's goal is monthly. So I guess that is more like 30 per 1k per 30 days (.1%).
There some discussion of necessary testing rates in this NY magazine article:
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/white-house-plan-for...
It looks like .2% is at the low end of most ready-to-reopen requirements. In any event, it looks we're nowhere near a test for anyone who wants one.
Also, does anyone know of a good chart that graphs daily new cases vs new tests? It seems like that ratio would be significant, especially when comparing case rates between regions.
1. You can't actually randomly choose people, so it's being done on a fist-come, first-serve basis. 2. Testing all asymptomatic people on any regular basis would take orders of magnitude more tests, so it's not useful as a containment measure, just as a data-collection measure.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/full-list-cumulative-tota...
You are correct - but we (or rather the government) can snap it's fingers and compel some private companies that are well positioned to be able to manufacture tests to do so at a higher priority than other business concerns - or we (again the government) can issue generous contracts for testing supplies that guarantees payment to private companies manufacturing them even if the original quota of tests requested by the government is above the level we end up needing.
I think that large countries actually have an advantage here - a small country might not have any internal industry that'd be capable of manufacturing tests without heavy retooling - or that industry might be so small and specialized that scaling it up is infeasible. But even in that sort of a situation they can use market based solutions to bid on tests in a manner that motivates private companies in other countries to feel confident committing to test production - and that's only needed if there isn't any sort of altruistic world-banding-together-to-fight-the-issue effort.
And we’ve done that with things like masks and ventilators. But there is a key limiting factor with the tests, the reagant supply. Again, can’t just snap our fingers and make it happen faster. This isn’t AWS, we can’t just spin up more supply in an instant.
It’s not like every country is getting a ration of the same number of units - so it shouldn’t be harder for large countries. Again this is likely an issue for smaller countries as they have to compete with America for a share of the reagent supply.
It is though. Again, if a country with 300M people wants to test as many people per capita as a country of 30M, it needs _ten times as many tests_.
The US is, in many ways, a bunch of ~30M person countries, akin to the European Union. Freedom of movement, no customs between them, powerful state-level governments, etc.
Yes, in theory, but we're talking about trying to produce 10x of something limited by a resource in short supply the world over, with every country's government vying for their own cut. Instead of "reagent", pretend I told you the limiting factor was "Unobtanium." Hey no sweat, just find 10x of it! See how silly that line of reasoning is? Again, to put it in terms the HN crowd might understand, the production of physical goods isn't like spinning up servers in AWS.
Or are you just understand the impression that the US, who has produced by far the greatest number of tests (in absolute numbers) of any country in the world, just doesn't have the desire to obtain greater and greater numbers of tests?
In reality the USA has more purchasing leverage because it can exploit (and is exploiting) geopolitics, and can obtain at least as much reagent/unobtanium per capita as other countries right now.
To put it in terms you might understand, the USA has a better ability to source reagent than you do - see if you as an individual are able to procure even 1 litre of the stuff!
Yes. (I've answered this in more detail in the other comment thread, but Trump has repeatedly complained that testing = detected cases = bad look for him.)
There's no indication the Trump administration has invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up reagent production. They'd be wise to do so, if it's a genuine bottleneck.
I would assume so. Are you under the impression that the US simply doesn’t want to test as many people as possible?
Absolutely.
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-says-too-much-coronavi...
> "So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad."
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trump-on-allowing-grand-pr...
> "They would like to have the people come off. I’d rather have the people stay [on the ship]. But I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision. I would rather — because I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault."
He's not wrong though, look at the rest of the quote in context:
> "So the media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn't have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad,"
The correctly identified problem with increased testing is that lots of super geniuses, who apparently can't look past "big number is biggest" w.r.t. corona deaths, try to tie "most deaths" with "worst handling of the situation", completely ignoring, as I pointed out, that the US is doing better on a deaths/million basis than several European countries. Countries that supposedly have superior healthcare systems, healthier populations, and leaders not named Trump. Buuuuttt, no one wants to tie context like that to any of the numbers, so he's absolutely right that increased testing => increased reporting of infection => increased whining about how bad the country is doing.
And of course, this is all ignoring that it's not his call to make as far as how many tests are performed, otherwise we wouldn't be leading the world in absolute numbers of tests administered by a staggering degree. No, we'd be content to test nobody at all and brag about how no one is infected.
Yes it does, it’s proportionally more difficult. If you want a country of 300M to have as many tests per capita as a country of 30M, you need _ten times as many tests_.
Edit: Does anyone know why PPE supply is the one metric with little progress ? Seems to be the easiest thing to meet