March 18, 2020 4:00pm by David Farrar

Test test test

"Once again, our key message is:
test,
test,
test.

This is a serious disease. Although the evidence we have suggests that those over 60 are at highest risk, young people, including children, have died"-@DrTedros #COVID19 #coronavirus
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) March 16, 2020

Yet in New Zealand we are still getting reports of people being denied tests.

Unless we are at our testing capacity, we should test anyone who requests it. Only when we reach capacity limits should we prioritise it.

One good suggestion was to even randomly test 1,000 people, which may give us good data on if significant numbers of people who are asymptomatic are infected.

The Herald reports:

The Government is defending the testing regime for Covid-19 as the World Health Organisation came out today with a strong message to “test, test, test”.
“We have not seen an urgent enough escalation in testing, isolation and contact tracing, which is the backbone of the response,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
“We have a simple message for all countries: Test, test, test.”
National Party leader Simon Bridges added his voice this morning, saying the testing criteria should be loosened because the number of tests in New Zealand was “simply not good enough”.
“We’re now in a position where it’s under 600 tests in this country, when comparable countries like Norway have 8000. We should be in the thousands. And I think that’s why, frankly, we have only eight confirmed cases.”
There has been an average of 11 tests a day since the start of February, but Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that was not a fair measurement of the regime.
“My job is to make sure the capacity is there. It is,” Ardern said, adding capacity would reach 1500 tests a day later this week and continue to ramp up.

If we have capacity for 1,500 tests a day, why are we doing so few?

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