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Lacking vaccines, countries have relied on more non-pharmaceutical interventions to control the transmission of COVID-19. Despite the World Health Organization’s (WHO) call in March to “test, test and test”, policymakers disagree on how optimal testing is. A new study, by Ravindra Prasan Rannan-Eliya and co-authors from the Institute for Health Policy in Colombo, Sri Lanka, uses data from multiple online sources to quantify the impact of testing on COVID-19 transmissibility in 173 countries and territories. (equal to 99% of the cases in the world) between March and June 2020.
The authors found that among interventions, test intensity had the greatest influence: a tenfold increase in the ratio of tests to new cases reported a reduction in mean COVID-19 transmission of 9%. The authors note that this helps explain why countries like China, Australia, and New Zealand have achieved near-elimination of COVID-19, and why blockades and other interventions have failed to slow the spread of the virus to others, such as India and Peru. .
“Even the richest countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Qatar, cannot expand testing and tracking fast enough to gain control of the epidemic,” the authors conclude. “Early and continuous aggressive testing to keep incidence within the ability to test, track and isolate may be the best implementation of curve flattening.”
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