[cloudwizard]

What do you mean quietly beat it? Whenever they had a small outbreak, they would test the entire city. Symptomatic, asymtomatic, everyone in the span of a week. They spent a ton of money on shutdowns, testing, and contact tracing.

[ppf]

Yep, I've seen one or two reports of entire cities being tested. What testing method do they use, that is accurate enough to catch all cases in a very densly populated developing city (and within a week)? Unless Covid isn't as infectious as we have been lead to believe, that doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

[azurezyq]

RT-PCR, it's pretty good but takes time.

They just do batch tests and mix samples in groups, if positive, test again. My father did one a few months ago after returning from Qingdao, where there were a small outbreak then in a hospital.

China is really good at doing things at scale and honestly US is nowhere close (too slow and too inefficient, from what I see here in Santa Clara)

[true_religion]

It’s PCR and you can get it down to a few hours turn around time in a lab, even in the US. China does batch testing with retests for accuracy.

The main difficulty is getting everyone to give a sample but with China’s level of social cohesion and control that is a solved problem.

[azurezyq]

It's still cheaper than what the US is currently doing. Lockdown is almost a whole year and numerous restaurants I usually go closed permanently.

While in China, it's like putting sparks off here and there, but most of people are not affected. If the problem can be solved by money, it's not a real problem.