Group Testing Is Our Surefire Secret Weapon Against Coronavirus

I've been thinking that mass testing is going to be the next new normal.. but this is likely months out, until hospital demands for tests are met, then we can start filling the demand for the general public.

Involving the military and forcing people to be tested never crossed my mind though and I found this idea rather extreme.

>Group testing is a super efficient way of finding out who’s infected and who’s not. Iceland’s doing it.

>As I've written and as Iceland is showing, testing every American every day and giving those who test negative a badge for the day to work, shop, frequent restaurants, etc. will let us separate those who are healthy from those that are sick

Not sure what Forbes is talking about here, Iceland sure isn't doing that.

There's two parallel tracks for testing here in Iceland.

If you think you might be sick, you can call 1700. That'll pipe you through to the national health system who are running short on testing kits just like the rest of the planet and are saving them for people who are actually showing up at hospitals, so they know what to treat them for. If your symptoms are mild, you'll be told to self-quarantine for 14 days, and you won't get tested. There are currently ~10,000 people in this state: https://www.covid.is/data

Alternatively, decode genetics is doing public testing, but you have to call them and book. They're booked out for weeks, and they're not directly sharing the test results with the public health sector in any kind of public register, they're just giving the test subjects the results directly. They're constrained in their ability to publicly share personally identifiable medical data, as they should be even in a crisis such as this.

But as for this "badges for people who test negative", I have no idea what forbes is talking about. No one here is getting badged, nor have I heard of anyone getting a test a second time. In so far as Iceland is experiencing good success managing covid, it's because Icelanders are just being a very civilized and well educated people and have been respecting the quarantine with relatively little coercion required and with very little in the way of crazy hoarding. Plus, every shop I've been to has used tape to mark out 2 metre increments from their till to help people line up safely, and almost all of them have hand sanitizer available for customers to use after they've used the credit card PIN pad. Little things like that help.

However, Iceland is by no means out of the weeds yet. The governments estimate as researched by the university of Iceland ( https://covid.hi.is ) thinks we might cap out at 2500 infections total, which is around 0.7% of the population. That's revision 2, the first estimate thought it might cap out at 1200, and they had to double it pretty quickly.

On the other hand, a local software developer I met a few years ago who is a pretty switched on guy smashed out this estimator ( https://covid-cases.now.sh ) which does some simple viral modelling to make relatively non-controversial predictions, and it's suggesting that we could cap out at more like 30,000 based on the last 14 days of growth, which is a solid 10% of the population. The reality is probably somewhere in the middle, hopefully more towards HI's estimate.

So in synopsis, Forbes seems to be making things up, and as usual Iceland is not actually a glorious northern paradise run by prescient sages. We're just as worried and in the dark as the rest of you, and our government is fumbling the situation a bit as well. Fortunately, our population is much smaller, so it's easier to adjust for the fumbling as we go along.