[makomk]

As far as I know, it's still the case that no reasonably-large country is doing much more coronavirus testing than the US right now. The UK is probably just about over the 30 tests per 1k per 30 days mark averaged over a week as of our last testing increase, Germany might still be slightly below it but I haven't seen recent figures from them and they seemed to have stalled out increasing testing, and other countries are similar.

[Marsymars]

FWIW my province of 4.4 million is stalled on tests being run because it's run out of additional symptomatic people to test at around 30 tests per 1k per 30 days, even though testing capacity is about double that, and still increasing.

[mirimir]

Why not start testing randomly chosen asymptomatic people?

[Marsymars]

They did this week, but it has some limitations:

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.

[ceejayoz]

“The United States currently ranks 32nd in Covid-19 tests per capita, one spot ahead of Belarus.” https://twitter.com/brianklaas/status/1259942315508064257

[makomk]

That ranking's not terribly informative. A lot of the countries heading it up are smaller ones since most countries are drawing from the same global pool of testing consumables, meaning that there's not much relationship between the difficulty of carrying out a particular number of tests and the size of the country, it's total tests done which doesn't tell you much about current testing rate, and large developed Western countries are close enough in testing rates that an actual ranking based on them probably wouldn't be very stable anyway.

[cellar_door]

And ahead of the UK, France, and South Korea

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

[xienze]

The problem with talking about per capita testing numbers is that having a bigger population means you need a proportionally larger number of tests to administer to reach the same numbers as smaller countries. The will to test and the money to do so aren’t any issue. The problem is that we can’t just snap our fingers and make tens of millions of tests appear out of thin air. I think this point gets lost on a lot of people when they look at the corona scoreboard (likewise, people fixate on the large number of deaths in the US and ignore that we’re doing better than several European nations on a deaths per million basis).

[munk-a]

> The problem is that we can’t just snap our fingers and make tens of millions of tests appear out of thin air.

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.

[xienze]

> 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

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.

[Closi]

America does have just as good of an ability to secure reagent supplies as any other countries though, excluding the ones that produce it domestically. The exception time this is that different testing machines require different reagents.

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.

[xienze]

> 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.

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_.

[kshacker]

How long does it take to double the reagent supply? Is there a number? Is it something we have started or not even that?

[xienze]

> Is it something we have started or not even that?

I would assume so. Are you under the impression that the US simply doesn’t want to test as many people as possible?

[qotgalaxy]

But none of that matters. You have x number of people, you need y number of tests. Just because it's harder to do doesn't mean you need to do it any less.

[xienze]

> But none of that matters.

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_.

[ceejayoz]

That's not what "proportionally" means.