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Comment by zizee | Hacker News Reader

> No country except Iceland or South Korea knows how many are infected, everyone else's numbers are horribly wrong.

Is South Korea still consideered an outlier WRT testing regimes? Not to throw shade on their great efforts in leading the way, but many other countries now have extensive testing.

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Australia has highest per-capita testing in the world. New Zealand is doing well. A number of other developed nations have been testing people since the start, but Australia and NZ have some added benefits of distance and relatively small populations that are helping them counter the pandemic better than most.

I don't see those facts in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing#Virus_testing...

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-testing#testing

I'd be wary of handing out superlatives just yet in any case.

In Australia we are testing people with symptoms (recently expanded in most places to hae no additional criteria). Some counties with a bigger outbreak/ lesser lockdowns are going to have more people with symptoms to test. 1.7% positive rate is one of the lowest in the world and combined with high testing suggests we are detecting most symptomatic cases.

NZ is mostly just testing people with symptoms too. That's pretty worrying to me given data like this article's. I think we should also be testing big random samples from the population. We've started testing hundreds of apparently-healthy volunteers, which is a good start: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/health/coronavirus/12107495...

Also for anyone looking at NZ/Australia graphs, a large number of the cases are people returning from overseas that are detected (it is estimated there are 1 million NZers overseas, 5 million left). This has the effect of making the exponential growth look slow (unless the community transmission goes out of control, but both countries appear to be preventing uncontrolled CT).

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