I could not resist quoting from a tweet by a well-known person who will remain nameless here:
Our testing is so much bigger and more advanced than any other country (we have done a great job on this!) that it shows more cases. Without testing, or weak testing, we would be showing almost no cases. Testing is a double edged sword – Makes us look bad, but good to have!!!
Twitter, 15th June 2020
This is absolutely right! But with one caveat: These are reported cases, not real cases. Of course, if there is no testing and no reporting, there will be no reported cases but of course, there will still be infections and deaths going on in the background.
What does matter, is less the actual numbers, but the trend. I wish journalists would stop at saying ‘the largest/second largest death numbers‘ but concentrate on the increase/decrease (or at least on relative numbers, for example per head).
The trend is actually not good in the country this tweet comes from (R is still close to 1), which makes testing even more important.
Why is testing important? Why do we need to know how many infected individuals are there? Mainly to see whether our strategy of confining the virus works or not and what are the risks associated with changing the strategies. More on it in my article on the second wave at The Conversation. We also need it to guard against superspreading events, as described here, so my advice is that any large gatherings like planned here should be accompanied by big and advanced testing.
So, I fully agree with the author – testing is good to have!