We need more discussion of Slovakia’s approach: Mass testing everybody with cheap antigen tests, testing is semi voluntary, if you don’t have a negative test result you have to quarantine.
I maintain that the Slovak government has shown extraordinary competence here, when compared against an admittedly low international baseline. Even more astonishingly, the Lancet article makes it seem like they went against the advise of their scientific advisors who pushed for a 45 days lockdown.
Before doing nationwide testing, they implemented a successful local test run.
They understand what an incubation period is, and are therefore doing two runs, last weekend and this weekend.
With antigen tests they settled for a good enough solution, understanding that they will catch the vast majority of infectious people who PCR tests would have caught as well.
They managed to mobilize this whole initiative seemingly in a span of 2-3 weeks, with soldiers making sure distances are kept in waiting lines.
What I find most surprising is how discerning the government was in picking out the right advice and ignoring the bad scientific advice (at best governments follow one set of advisors completely, mostly they implement their recommendations in a worse than random way). Why bad? Because most epidemiologists only consider medical harm but not economic, and let the perfect be the enemy of the good:
The bad advice included: Antigen tests are less reliable than PCR tests, that there would be high infection risks at the testing sites, that not enough doctors would be available, that it would be immoral to forcibly quarantine people who do not want to be tested (apparently much better to effectively quarantine everybody in a lockdown), that a lockdown that would crush the economy was the better approach( what comes after the lockdown when the numbers will most likely rise again?)
This is not to say that each individual point was wrong or unlikely to happen, just that the epistemic standard when trying something new should not be “this will definitely work without any problems” but “this is worth a shot”, particularly when the other alternatives have huge downsides as well. Neither am I saying that everything was done perfectly (I am unsure whether it is best to exclude 65+ citizens, citizens could maybe also do the swab testing supervised but themselves)
The jury is still out on whether this will flatten the numbers, but we should all hope that it works out for them so we have a viable alternative.
We need more discussion of Slovakia’s approach: Mass testing everybody with cheap antigen tests, testing is semi voluntary, if you don’t have a negative test result you have to quarantine.
I maintain that the Slovak government has shown extraordinary competence here, when compared against an admittedly low international baseline. Even more astonishingly, the Lancet article makes it seem like they went against the advise of their scientific advisors who pushed for a 45 days lockdown.
Before doing nationwide testing, they implemented a successful local test run.
They understand what an incubation period is, and are therefore doing two runs, last weekend and this weekend.
With antigen tests they settled for a good enough solution, understanding that they will catch the vast majority of infectious people who PCR tests would have caught as well.
They managed to mobilize this whole initiative seemingly in a span of 2-3 weeks, with soldiers making sure distances are kept in waiting lines.
What I find most surprising is how discerning the government was in picking out the right advice and ignoring the bad scientific advice (at best governments follow one set of advisors completely, mostly they implement their recommendations in a worse than random way). Why bad? Because most epidemiologists only consider medical harm but not economic, and let the perfect be the enemy of the good:
The bad advice included: Antigen tests are less reliable than PCR tests, that there would be high infection risks at the testing sites, that not enough doctors would be available, that it would be immoral to forcibly quarantine people who do not want to be tested (apparently much better to effectively quarantine everybody in a lockdown), that a lockdown that would crush the economy was the better approach( what comes after the lockdown when the numbers will most likely rise again?)
This is not to say that each individual point was wrong or unlikely to happen, just that the epistemic standard when trying something new should not be “this will definitely work without any problems” but “this is worth a shot”, particularly when the other alternatives have huge downsides as well. Neither am I saying that everything was done perfectly (I am unsure whether it is best to exclude 65+ citizens, citizens could maybe also do the swab testing supervised but themselves)
The jury is still out on whether this will flatten the numbers, but we should all hope that it works out for them so we have a viable alternative.