[sp332]

Yeah but about HALF of those tests were done in the last TWO days! Capacity is coming online very rapidly now and while we are starting from behind, we will not be so short on tests for long. Roche alone is shipping 400,000 tests per week and Abbot Labs is on track to perform one million tests per week in the next couple of weeks. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/america-is-final...

[shalmanese]

The important number is the ratio of tests:true case count. You need ~1000 - 10,000X tests/case to do true contact tracing because you want to a) blanket the country with tests and test every single suspected case even if 99% of them end up not being COVID 19 and b) proactively quarantine every person that a positive person has come into contact with and then test each of those people every single day for 14 days until they come up negative. If a single of those people come up positive, then you want to proactively quarantine all the people THAT person came into contact with, rinse and repeat.

It's great that tests are finally ramping up but the growth in testing can never exceed the growth in cases if cases are doubling every finite number of days. The choices are a severe lockdown where R < 0.5 until the true case count drops to near 0, a non-severe lockdown where R ~1.2 - 1.8 (Hubei's lockdown had an R of 1.3 in the early days until they figured out centralized quarantine could bring it down to 0.4) and you just continue the lockdown indefinitely, or "herd immunity" where R stays at 2.4 until pretty much everyone in the country gets sick.

Once you get your true case load down below your test load, then you can think about using non-pharmaceutical interventions (universal masking, universal temperature screening, mandatory hand washing when entering into a gathering space etc.) along with rigorous contact tracing to ensure that any future outbreaks remain small and contained.

[sp332]

I agree with wanted to blanket the country in tests, but you don't need 1000 tests to do contact tracing for one person, even normally, let alone during social distancing.

You don't need to test people every day for 14 days.

[shalmanese]

You do because as soon as that person is confirmed positive, then you need to contact trace and quarantine that person's contacts. Every day that goes between a confirmed positive and a contact trace, the more that person's contacts are walking around, spreading it asymptomatically and making the cluster even more out of control.