[progbits]

Slovakia did this in November [1]. Population ~5.5M, 2.5M tested over a single weekend for the first run.

Afterwards there were a few more weekends with lower turnout and until about month or two ago there were free testing places all over the country. These were during many periods require to cross between regions, go to work or shops. Significant fraction of population was getting tested on weekly-biweekly basis.

I can't find a good chart because most only show PCR tests (for a good reason!) but according to [2] Slovakia averaged 7300 tests per 1000 people.

The initial mass testing weekend was useful to get an overview of distribution of the infections and remove a large chunk of the infected from the pool (despite high false negative rate of those tests). It was also good PR and made people more aware how serious the situation is and reconsider if they would rather wear the mask and distance than go through this.

However the continued testing is now viewed as mostly useless. More money spent or tracing and targeted PCR testing, plus vaccine campaigns could have helped more.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/01/half-slovakia-... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#how-many-test...