Dr. Tomás Ryan:

I will begin and ask Dr. Schaffer to take it from there. Dr. Schaffer and I disagree on a zero Covid strategy but on the technical aspects of testing we are in complete agreement. The first thing to note on testing as we do it is that it is about information. Testing does not do anything itself, it is not a magical suit of armour against the virus, it is information that works for public health medicine. It works for contact tracing and for public health physicians. They have limited staff and a limit to the work that they can do. Looking at the most successful countries for test and trace infrastructure, South Korea is probably the model. It works with a total testing capacity which is about 25% of our total testing capacity per capita. That was enough for South Korea to crush its first curve without a lockdown and it was also enough for it to deal with the recent spike in infections. It is not so much about testing capacity as about the ability to quickly integrate that with the public health operation to crush outbreaks while there are still small numbers of cases. Our opportunity for doing that seems to have been in early August and it is clear that our system was not able to do that. Now, there is a need to either focus on restrictions or substantially increase testing capacity to the level of, say, what Denmark is doing now.

This is all about diagnostics. Screening is a very different topic which we can return to later, but Dr. Schaffer should continue answering the question.