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CHina’s chief epidemiologist, Wu Zunyou, has said that mass testing of millions of people is expensive and exaggerated. Sophia yan reports.
“From the scientific perspective of epidemiology, you don’t need to test everyone,” Wu told Chinese state media.
Local Qingdao city officials recently rushed to screen the 9 million residents over five days, the first step Chinese authorities have taken to combat subsequent outbreaks of coronavirus after it emerged in Wuhan. In the end, only 12 results came back positive.
“But this type of judgment is based on experience and can only be 95 to 99 percent accurate,” Wu said. There is a “probability of uncertainty of 1% to 5%”.
Even a hint of uncertainty prompts local officials to conduct massive tests, especially as they are keen to show the central government in Beijing that everything possible is being done to control the spread of the coronavirus.
The bureaucrats think that “if you put everyone to the test … it will make one hundred percent sure that the outbreak has been contained.”
Rather, it is enough to stop mass testing when the first few batches mostly come back with negative results, as officials did in June in Beijing in response to a cluster outbreak, he said. Detailed contact tracing will also be helpful.
At first, city authorities planned to test the entire city of 20 million, but were eventually halted in the middle at the urging of experts, as many tests came back negative.
“When tests of tens of thousands of people, or hundreds of thousands, came back negative, the data was enough” to show that there were not many more new infections, he said. Otherwise, “the social cost will be enormous and unnecessary.”
In pictures, authorities try to test millions of Qingdao residents
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