Reopening and Testing Capacity (and Scientific Capacity)

Yesterday, on July 24th, in Costa Rica's daily press conference on coronavirus, it was reported that at the beginning of the pandemic the testing capacity was 2000 tests a week. That number has risen since to 2000 a day.

Over the past two weeks, about 400 through 600 new confirmed daily cases have been reported through testing. The authorities announced that around 24% of daily tests have come out positive in the last few days on average. Taking the data of July 23th, we've got $\tfrac{768}{2000}$ daily positive cases over daily testing capacity; that is 38.4% daily tests that came out positive.

Therefore, we are either doing a really small amount of testing (and pretty localized too), or the 'real' amount and increase of cases is much higher.

Week after week, authorities report some of the difficulties to get tests in the international markets.

Clearly, our failure is testing. Some months ago, a plan to develop Costa Rican made tests was announced. Nowhere to be heard again as of yet.

Let's focus on testing capacity. What went wrong?

Let's take a brief look at South America. Uruguay has 3 million inhabitants and could allocate human capital and infrastructure to develop their own COVID PCR test, now amounting to 20000 daily tests (locally-made!). That is 10 times what Costa Rica has.

Costa Rica has five million inhabitants and is required by its constitution to spend annually 8% of its GDP in education. Sadly, and this crisis severely shows this, resources are misallocated. There is an abysmal waste in that 'education' spending. Has it all gone towards education? No!

That spending has paid eccentric salaries even to university janitors, and many of the resources are allocated to majors that don't contribute much (or any at all) to economic or scientific development. Seriously, we are not educating enough scientists and engineers. The available resources are not going where they ought to go. PCR exists since 1986!

Further questioning shall be made on the subject. Moreover, the Instituto Clodomiro Picado has been developing a serum from coronavirus recovered patients, as a treatment against coronavirus. But reading what BioTech companies and other universities around the world can do regarding the production of antivirals, I dare say we are stuck in the 1920s.

Without enough testing, reopening is doomed. Countries that could reopen, or stay open amid the pandemic, owe it to their testing capacity, to their scientific capacity.