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Comment by alexandercrohde | Hacker News Reader

From my perspective, if (whoever is in charge) was really in the business of providing accurate numbers, they would test a statistical sample of these 2,300 people to estimate what percentage of them actually have the virus.

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Here in Germany a little known tidbit is that the routine sampling system that is already in place to observe influenza has started to check for SARS-CoV-2 as well. It's only a sampling of people sick enough to visit a doctor (not whole population random sampling), but at least this sampling is not limited to people with a known infection path which would completely blindside you to community spread. I don't think that this has been running for long enough to already have meaningful results, but it will eventually put an end to flying blind. Given the value of discovering undiscovered clusters and getting better statistics I think that this is a much much better allocation of testing resources than checking the most likely candidates whom you'd want to quarantine anyways due to the likelihood of false negatives during incubation.

A very similar test allocation might also be running in America without anyone but a few experts taking notice. Here in Germany it has technically been on the news but it was completely drowned out by the pointless shouting match between "it cannot be worse than a cold" (because it would interfere with my precious vacation plans) and "our healthcare wouldbe just as overwhelmed as in Wuhan" (because, I don't know, maybe I'm just not racist enough to assume that it will somehow only be bad in China)

I think the CDC has been rolling SARS-CoV-2 testing out to the US influenza surveillance system. They actually tried to do this in mid-February but ran into problems with the testing kits. Obviously this would have left the US in a much better position to monitor it, though I doubt that'd stop wild theories about how it was everywhere spreading virally.

Fascinating. I'd love to see a system like that in America.

There are R0 and transmission probability estimates out there. If you sniff around I think you might find the study you're asking for. As usual, media outlets are not scientific, so if you want proactive understanding (as opposed to reactive reporting) you will need to follow the literature yourself. Too bad there is no news service for that.

i smell a market opportunity

I think that some of the science adjacent podcasts which provide in depth show note and literature analysis for people willing to pay 10/15 bucks a month are a step in that direction.

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