Originally Posted by
helvetic
Some (many) just don't understand exponential growth. It's a tricky concept for humans to natural grasp. I don't blame them for not getting it… we didn't evolve counting things growing exponentially. When we were still hunter-gatherers and our brains evolved, things grew linearly.
Or maybe they know and they just feel better playing dumb than facing a harsh reality.
Wuhan coronavirus outbreak — worries as it spread to HK & beyond
Yup, HK takes it super seriously. We remember SARS (not that I was here for it)
Not incompetence just reality. 1500 tests = 750 people. But when you first set up you need to use up a lot of tests to calibrate instruments etc. So really you only get a couple hundred people tested out of it.
My understanding is that Alaska has been extending their testing kits to cover more people. AFAICT the method is to aggregate samples from a lot of relatively low risk individuals and run the test together. If it's negative, all of them have been "proved" to be negative and if it's positive, the test would be rerun individually or in smaller groups to identify who is infected.
BTW a couple days ago in a USA hotel, not in an area with lots of cases, I was waiting for the elevator and heard someone coughing severely as she walked down the hall. In the elevator lobby, the guest continued to cough and made no attempt to cover her mouth. When the elevator arrived, I said that I would wait for the next one, at which point she sarcastically insisted that she didn't have corona. I wish I had thought to ask her whether she had been tested as it was extremely unlikely that she "knew" that she didn't have COVID-19.