Apart from the inevitable inquest a couple of years down track what is the point in looking back right now? I just don't see the point of this constant negative posting tbh.
It's clearly too late. Having 20,000 tests a day in the first days of April was far more useful than quibbling about whether you're at 90,000 or 100,000 tests a day for the final day, which is pretty meaningless outside of a political context. Had the government hit their 10,000 and 25,000 targets when they said I would have been far more impressed than hitting 100,000 by the end of April. Having a smaller 'bigger' capacity earlier than a bigger capacity later is more useful for the present. Sadly the case with Singapore you still need to up it as once you're testing your cases and a third/half of them are coming back positive you've screwed as your capacity is essentially vastly exceeded by those that probably have the virus or ones you'd want to test. It puts us in a good place for wave 2. As long as capacity doesn't get reduced/can be switched on quickly it puts us in a good place for the winter.
Being able to test 50,000
actual people in a single day or 100,000 tests or whatever headline figure a government wants to call it does allow you do to important stuff. So IPSOS Mori is able to mount a robust study about what percentage of the population have it. This is important. Hancock/other organisations army of 18,000 contact tracers is able to have something to work with, although given what's going on locally with that I have very severe doubts about it going on if you're not white or relatively well off. It may turn out that concentrating a proportion of those tests exclusively for care homes would be a wise strategy. It's an economic consideration but having 100,000 a day and a figure to brag about and allow the 'public' to be tested will reassure a percentage of the public about going back to 'normal'. As a political consideration it's a part of one of the five stupidly vague tests. To a certain extent the current testing regime keeps some of our hospital workers and in other health care settings which have easy access a bit safer, although PPE has a massive bearing.
There are rumours of a few tech/logistical innovations on the way in all the different testing regimes. This would be amazing if they can be deployed over the summer.
Aside from the 1,2, 4 and the orange bit of the graphs they produce each day, we haven't the foggiest who is actually being tested. Some had doubts that the government were even keeping postcodes and it was just positive or not.
