TEST, TEST, & TEST

Since the being of the Pandemic, The WHO could not have stressed the importance of Testing as the core strategy to fight the spread of the disease. “We have a simple message for all countries, test, test, test,” Said the WHO Director Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. But why testing is important? 

 Testing is important for diagnosis so treatment can begin, also for isolating the infected persons to stop the spread of the disease and to do contact tracing and isolate exposed persons. The objective from Lockdown is/was to control the spread so hospitals have time to deal with the influx of patients while at the same time health authorities can have the time to invest in building testing capacity and contact tracing and isolation facilities. As no one knows exactly the number of people who are infected, testing plays a crucial part in providing a window on how the virus is spreading and where. This information is vital to the response, otherwise, you will be acting blindly and resources will be misplaced. 

Countries that were able to increase there testing capacity early were able to get hold of the virus spread such as South Korea and Germany and countries that did not are still struggling to control the virus spread such as the USA. 

 Regardless of the resources available to each country, you won’t be able to test everyone but it is important to test enough to be able to monitor the outbreak. But how you will be able to say if a country is testing enough? The positive rate is the percentage of positive sample out from the total tests performed. If you want to know if a country is testing enough you need to look at its positivity rate. If the positive rate is high this indicates that there is a lot of cases out there in the community and out of a few tests you will find one positive. By increasing testing, the positive rate starts to fall which mean you are testing enough but also the spread fo the virus is slowing down. E.g. look at the trends of the positivity rate between the USA, Germany, and South Korea. You will notice after the USA ramped up its testing capacity the positive rate fell sharply between April and June but then the positive rate started to increase again which indicating that the country lost control over the virus. Also, from the graph, you will notice that South Korea was ready for the virus as its positive rate never went beyond 5%, while Germany faced difficulty in testing at first but was able to catch up. The WHO has suggested a positive rate of around 3–12% as a general benchmark of adequate testing. So how Sudan is holding when it comes to testing? 

 As of (August 5th, 2020) the total number of tests performed in Sudan is around 28051 and the total number of confirmed cases is 11878 which give you a positive rate of 42.3%. We made great progress going from 100% all the way to 42% but we are still not testing enough to get a window on the virus spread in the community. Is it because Sudan lacks the resources to do so? One way to know is to compare Sudan with a similar country like Ethiopia. Both, Sudan and Ethiopia, had their first COVID-19 patient on the same day. The maximum positive rate for Ethiopia was 6% on July 13th. But is Sudan and Ethiopia are performing the same number of tests? Sadly Sudan is doing far less than Ethiopia as you can see from the graph 

 While Sudan testing rate has improved but it never passed 0.02 test per 1000 population. With this level of testing, controlling the Pandemic is going to be hard and we will not get a good picture of how bad the situation is in the community. It is hard to make a good sound policy when you are in the dark. Authorities Must increase test capacity and look into other methods such as pool testing to cover more areas while it is building its capacity. If the virus is not under control the human and the economic cost will be unbearable. 

Reference: 

[Coronavirus (COVID-19) Testing - Statistics and Research - Our World in Data](https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing)