More tests needed

Mor Prom might give an overly rosy picture of our fight against Covid-19 because it doesn’t relate infections found to the number of tests which yielded those cases.

Consider that “Cambodia’s official daily Covid-19 case numbers tumbled 76% in one day after PM Hun Sen told officials to stop administering rapid tests to people who don’t show symptoms” according to a Nikkei Asia report on Oct 1.

This astounding result was because “approximately 59% of all transmission is caused by presymptomatic individuals who hadn’t yet developed symptoms and asymptomatic people who never developed symptoms” as reported in Health News on Jan 11. Hun Sen produced a “miracle” by testing only those showing symptoms.

Are we following Hun Sen’s example? It’s not clear; we’re doing far too little testing for reliable infection data. Countries doing very few tests per confirmed case are unlikely to be testing widely enough to find all cases. We conduct just 4.5 tests/confirmed case, versus Malaysia’s 7.3 and the UK’s 23.2.

Of the tests we’ve given, a whopping 22.3% have turned out positive — over double the 10% that the WHO considers to be a general benchmark of adequate testing.

So, is Mor Prom credible? Only as far as it goes — user beware, for we need much, much more testing.

BURIN KANTABUTRA