Not many countries were anywhere near the level of today’s testing in the spring. 10-20k tests a day was massive back then compared to nearly every where else. Most other countries didn’t have the equipment or anything back then. France where I am is now is supposedly testing over a million per week. Plus, most of the west by March had let it get out control. Their much criticized testing was the result of running behind the wave.
Listen I am not from the US, and therefore have no political agenda. The US has tested massively, and Trumps China ban were both commendable. His Euro ban was also a good thing. At least he tried at the beginning. The UK and Europe looked the other way.
Again, when you have it under control, and the hospitals are not filling up , and you have solid testing and tracing, and any flare ups are localized, you don’t need to(but it would also be good to) test en mass.
Unlike the northern hemisphere which is in the shit now, where mass concentrated testing would be a great thing. Instead of waiting for the symptomatic people or their contacts.
The emboldened is a common misconception fueled by the propaganda I pointed out. We didn't let it get out of control any more than South Korea did. There are some very large differences that led to the discrepancies in the "case" numbers and between countries, the biggest, most obvious factor being testing numbers.
You can introduce mass testing - real mass testing, not the lie sold to us by Bloomberg and other media outlets - into a perfectly healthy population today and find hundreds or thousands of positive test results because their Ct value is absurdly high and essentially worthless for detecting infectiousness. Governments and media then report 100% of those positive test results as infectious cases that all require isolation, contact tracing, etc and enact lock downs which we know for a fact do not work to mitigate or stop the spread.
The hospitalizations and deaths are an entirely different beast that, while also subject to poor reporting/misattribution, were pumped up because of panic fueled by propaganda. That panic caused chaos and led to many unnecessary deaths, both with and without covid. Health workers were afraid to go to work, hospitals were (and remain) reorganized with entire portions closed off entirely, etc,.
I brought it up in a tweet recently from a Nobel laureate that said this tear in our social fabric, this sudden and drastic change to the way we live our lives, will do a great deal of damage. It definitely did when lock downs were first introduced.
The "success" we see from countries has absolutely nothing to do with containment and everything to do with the manner in which they live their lives. The freer, more chill the country, the better the results. Sweden did a great job demonstrating this, up until now anyway.
We're in a war, an information war, and in order to see the truth you have to push past the fog (re: propaganda, obfuscation of facts). That's not easy for most to do because they don't have the time or willingness to dedicate to it, they simply rely on the information provided to them from the mainstream news or their governments and that often isn't enough. Much of the mainstream media wants to keep this narrative running for financial reasons and governments have their own self-serving interests.
Measuring success or failure in terms of public health has to go well beyond a "covid zero" strategy, especially when the experts have admitted this virus will remain with us long after vaccines arrive.
You say mass testing is a good thing in the northern hemisphere because "they're in the shit" without bringing up the fact they're in that shit every year - hospitals always get filled up this time of year. Ergo, mass testing is doing more harm than good, it is propagating unsubstantiated fear. The southern hemisphere isn't in the shit because this virus is exhibiting seasonal behavior. Most regions in the northern hemisphere were in that same space in summer.
www.statnews.com
www.telegraph.co.uk
