Dr. Tomás Ryan:

South Korea had 75% less testing capacity. What I said was that it has 25% of our current testing capacity, and that has been the case throughout the pandemic. South Korea was very rapid in responding early on. It had experience of SARS which is why it was able to take the bull by the horns. We could not have been expected to respond that way in the spring. However, arguably we could have been expected to make preparations to be ready to respond like that by August or September. Unfortunately we were not.

It is not just about capacity - our testing capacity is quite good by European standards and is greater than that in South Korea - but about how quickly that can be implemented with the public health infrastructure. One ingredient in South Korea's success is not just speed but that the number of cases never got very high. When we commented from the outside that South Korea was having a spike, it was at a level that would not have registered here. They crush these things very early and that is the crucial formula.

My concern now, and that of many colleagues, is that we have arrived at a situation where although our testing capacity is quite healthy, even if we did speed it up it might not be sufficient for us to suppress the virus from here, that is going from where we are to level 2 or 1, unless we combine it with restrictions. Theoretically, if the testing capacity is really increased it can help, but testing capacity works for public health medicine. There is a limiting factor here, unless one moves towards testing everyone in the population, in which case we would be discussing something very different.