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[Starver]

Wales meat plant suffers with COVID.

No idea how many foreigners (even saeson) were involved.

[thompson]

USA now has more confirmed COVID-19 cases than the entire continent of Europe. Granted, testing is probably more comprehensive in the US, but I think they’ve earned the prize. Virus trajectory shows another inflection point now, so should be resuming an exponential trajectory soon. Europe still leads in deaths, but I don’t expect that to last.

[ChairmanPoo]

USA now has more confirmed COVID-19 cases than the entire continent of Europe.  Granted, testing is probably more comprehensive in the US,

Only in Trump's imagination
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104645/covid19-testing-rate-select-countries-worldwide/

Tests per million
UAE   303,457
Qatar   110,289
Russia   107,445
UK   106,956
Spain   103,232
Portugal   101,227
Singapore   98,514
Belgium   91,135
Belarus   84,707
USA   80,755
Italy     79,908
Canada   60,837
Germany   60,038

Tests per confirmed case is probably more informative as some of those countries have done less testing because they controlled the outbreaks better. But the US doesnt do well there either

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-daily-tests-vs-daily-new-confirmed-cases-per-million

[thompson]

Testing rates vary a lot between different European countries. Some parts of Eastern Europe have very low rates, for instance. Not sure what it all comes out to overall, so I erred on the side of caution by understating US incompetence. The higher death rate in Europe does raise some questions about whether there was significant undercounting in the early phases before testing was scaled up. There are big demographic differences that can explain this, of course.

For the record, I suspect COVID-19 is more widespread in the US than Europe, but don’t have hard data on that. The trends are much clearer, and in the end it’s those trends we should be most concerned about.

[dragdeler]

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[ChairmanPoo]

Lukashenko is as bad as Trump he has denied the importance of the pandemic time and again.

[dragdeler]

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[dragdeler]

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[Frumple]

There's no real need to suspect, we've had steady controversy in some states (Florida, ferex) about people trying to conflate number of tests with number of people tested, in an attempt to make testing numbers look less fucking abysmally insufficient. Not that having higher tests per million is a bad thing, but it's not the only or necessarily the best statistic for tracking whether testing is meeting the demands of the situation on the ground. It's a "necessary but not sufficient" deal. You can't get by without it, but you won't necessarily do well with it.

Mind you, the tests are also somewhat shitty so if there's not a fair amount of redundancy, you're probably missing infected, so... yeah.

[Starver]

UK testing figures have certainly been compounded "beneficially". Someone gets a nose swab and a throat swab, that's two tests. They need it redoing due to inconclusiveness, that's another two. Confirmation with a blood test could add to that, or if they were negative in the morning but there was still concern they were too early to detect properly the highly suspected result, they might be tested again in the afternoon (assuming the results were available by then!) and that adds up to more tests (maybe still not confirming anything), but still only one person tested.

When, despite all this (and other practices) they still needed to make it look like more tests were done than were (already a small multiple of the number of people tested) they added in all thr testing kits mailed out to people on that day. After all, they'd now done as much as they could to ensure the test took place (they can't be held accountable for the delivery, the person taking the test[1], the person returning test, the lab properly processing that test and the test not turning out to be ambiguous, after everything else) so obviously they count it as a test as soon as it is first sent out..?

Then they stopped working on numbers of tests done (or 'in progress', however hazily) and switched to testing capacity. If they had test kits piling up and lab-time ready to process them but there just wasn't the footfall or not enough people got to the point of mail-ordering their kit, that shouldn't impact upon the potential number of tests done (however imaginatively) as an ever more ambitious target waa stretched for and desperately needed to be seen to be accomplished.

Then they added in tests done to test the tests (or potentially done) and even the new capacity to conduct antibody testing, even though it wasn't the kind of test they were promising this target to accomplish and wasn't even being used yet, just paid for (or invoiced for?) and actually sitting idle waiting for the time they'd eventually usefully switch to "have you had it" over the currently required "have you got it".

*Woooooosh.....* *BOOM BOOM*

Wow, those goalposts have broken the sound barrier, they've been moving so fast.


[1] Apparently some versions asked that a single swab (and just a single end of that swab..) be used to self-sample deeply into the recipients throat and nose. So not sure if that could ever count as "two tests", though I imagine it's possible.

[hector13]

At least in Wisconsin the number of tests doesn’t differentiate between multiple tests given to a single person (or multiple positive tests from one person, either) so, similar to what Starver says, that makes the numbers go up.

I think they wanted to perform 11k/day, but have fallen short of that number recently, after getting something along the lines of 8 consecutive days of at least that a few weeks ago.

Highest has been just about 16k in one day, at the start of that 8 day run.

Getting hundreds of positives a day regardless, amounting to around 2-4% of tests. Not sure if the tests aren’t getting done because people aren’t asking for them (I do believe that was something that wasn’t able to happen starting a few weeks ago) or they’re running low on supply/processing ability.

Not really sure how the process of opening up is going. I recall a proposed three stage plan from the governor back in May when the Republicans were all “myeh you can’t extend the stay at home order myeh” with the expectation that cases had to be showing a steady downward trend for 2 weeks prior to moving into the next stage, but I haven’t heard much since then, and as I say, cases are steadily showing that 2-3%/hundreds per day increase.

[Iduno]

Europe still leads in deaths, but I don’t expect that to last.

Only because the US has quit reporting cause of death.

[TamerVirus]

At this point everybody is fudging the numbers to suit there own agenda, be it creative counting/ deliberate lack of counting/ changing definitions/ etc.

[scriver]

Every one except Sweden, so at least we're handling something about this debacle well.

...Well, with the exception of the communes and/or the landsthing s.

[ChairmanPoo]

At this point everybody is fudging the numbers to suit there own agenda, be it creative counting/ deliberate lack of counting/ changing definitions/ etc.

Things are far less back to normal than the TV would have you believe . In theory all workplaces should be open and intra EU borders are open. In practice you go out and see many places remain closed, and the borders might be technically open but there are no flights so they might as well not be