ORIGINAL: Kull
ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins
So far testing here is still limited to those with likely symptoms or health care workers, so they are saying assume that for every confirmed case there are at least 16 out there we don't know about. Comforting. Hopefully the massive increase in testing that is being touted at the federal level, including readily available tests in Walmart and Walgreen's parking lots, will show up here soon and allow us to get much better recon on where the virus is or isn't.
A week ago (feels like ages....apparently we're living in dog years now) I posted testing stats per country from wikipedia, and
here's an update (current table on the left, earlier on the right). A bit of apples to oranges since they've added some columns and there's more provincial/state granularity, plus i didn't capture the bottom dwellers originally (and do now) but there are some interesting things to see (from what I can tell, the province/state numbers are subs-sets of the country numbers, so don't add them to your country's total):
1) UAE and Australia have gone from "not on the chart" to 4th and 6th respectively in total tests. It will be interesting to see if that translates into lower infection and death rates in the weeks to come
2) Germany isn't on either chart, which is very surprising. Obviously they must be testing, and it would be nice to see if there's a correlation to the low death rate. Not sure why it's not here.
3) The Chinese numbers haven't been updated since February (almost a month ago) and there's nothing from Iran.
4) Testing in the US is increasing at roughly the same rate as most countries, but more is obviously needed. We'll see if the new Roche tests and Korea-style drive throughs start to ramp up the numbers.
Thanks Kull.
1) I think yes. Australia has a very good health system, and the population is small, plus wealthy (on average). This much testing followed by distancing measures and the fact they're only just getting cooler now, and in general don't get as cold as other European countries fighting this now.
Ditto UAE. Although their economy has just disintegrated between the oil glut and tourism shutdown.
2) Good testing. Solid distancing measures. Great healthcare facilities.
3) What is happening in the rest of China one wonders? How did this just peter out when there were cases all over but other regions are all going back to work now?
4)The figure that worries me with the US is the testing per million: 116. The US is bigger by population than the combined people of the UK, Italy, France, Spain and Germany. Testing so little in such a large population means there is a lot of this virus going around and spreading and no one knows where, or how much.
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
