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country kept the testing and treatment facilities separate. By early April, it flattened the curve and held the parliamentary election. It now has a huge infrastructure for COVID-19 diagnosis—638 testing centres, including 80 drive-through screening kiosks, and a capacity to test 23,000 people a day. It did not have to resort to lockdowns. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says the country’s GDP would shrink only by 1.2 per cent this year.

Small wonder, widespread testing has become the mantra for defeating COVID-19. In the US, as President Donald Trump wants Americans to return to work and get the economy running, state governors are pushing and fighting for more tests. In the third week of May when the death toll neared the 100,000 mark—the highest in the world—the White House rebuked its top health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saying “it let the country down” on providing testing.

A drive-through testing facility in South Korea. Using its experience from the MERS outbreak in 2015, the country has not only set up a huge infrastructure for testing but also kept them separate from treatment facilities to avoid the spread of infection

CDC had botched up the testing kit it was asked to develop. It was only on February 28, a month after the first case was reported in the country, that CDC decided to rope in other public and private entities for developing tests. By April 27, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had issued emergency-use authorisation to 70 test developers. That day, Trump unveiled two documents—Testing and

said a big part of “opening up America again” depends on testing to determine how many had been exposed to the virus. By May 21, it was conducting 39.42 tests per 1,000 people; South Korea’s testing rate is 15.65 per 1,000.

In Africa, authorities are meanwhile struggling to compete with richer countries for procuring testing material on the global market. Even where there is enough money, many African health authorities are unable to obtain the supplies needed, says a commentary published published in