Kull
Posts: 2625
Joined: 7/3/2007
From: El Paso, TX
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Let's talk about testing. If you like polemic-free information (and hard stats), check out the Wikipedia page on Covid-19 testing. There are quite a few different tests out there, and the reliability varies.
For those interested in the US, we are currently #7 in the world in terms of "number of tests performed", and may be higher. The first table in the attachment is at the Wikipedia link, and you can sort it by totals, "as-of" date, and "per million" (the favorite statistic for those who want to play politics with this as it lists the US 4th from the bottom).
The second graph is important since it shows the counts ever since the CDC altered it's testing requirements by delegating responsibility to the state and local public health agencies. As more kits enter the pipeline, you'll start to see the testing numbers jump, simply because the bottleneck has been removed.
Speaking of which, let's consider South Korea. They certainly made rapid progress in the testing area, and that does appear to be a major contributing factor in their apparent (or at least relative) success. But why? Well, I'm not a fan of traditional media (here's the link to the whole story), but this is really important to know, and I haven't seen this information anywhere else:
quote:
An outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in 2015 killed 38 people in South Korea, with a lack of kits to test for the MERS pathogen meaning infected patients went from hospital to hospital seeking help, spreading the virus widely. Afterward, the country created a system to allow rapid approval of testing kits for viruses which have the potential to cause pandemics.
When the novel coronavirus emerged, that system allowed regulators to collaborate quickly with local biotech companies and researchers to develop testing kits based on a genetic sequence of the virus released by China in mid-January. Firms were then granted accreditation to make and sell the kits within weeks --a process that usually takes a year.
In a short space of time, South Korea has managed to test more than 140,000 people for the novel coronavirus, using kits with sensitivity rates of over 95%, according to the director of the Korean Society for Laboratory Medicine.
That's instructive. They had a bad experience with a deadly infectious disease, studied what went wrong, and implemented a system to respond better in the future. And we are seeing the fruits of that approach today.
Which could very well be the silver lining in this whole Covid-19 situation. There are going to be lots of lessons learned in the days, weeks, and months to come, and those *should* allow our societies to perform better the next time - and there WILL BE a "next time" - something like this arises.
Because if the next contagious new disease has mortality rates more in keeping with the Black Death, at least now we'll know what to do and when to do it, without having to lose a third of the world's population.
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RE: OT: Corona virus - 
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