LogFAQs > #943387973

MartianManchild posted...

Maybe Canada has less cases because theyve only done 4 million tests compared to the US which has done 68 million tests

Ah, yes, the favoured conservative talking point - "We only have more cases because we test more!"

Hate to break it to you bud, but you've got that perfectly backwards. You do more tests because you have more cases. Or, to put it more precisely, you do more tests because you need to do more tests because you have more people sick and dying and those people are sick and dying because they have the Coronavirus. And, as discussed ad nauseum, they have the Coronavirus because America is shit at pandemic management.

Most other countries aren't testing nearly as much because they don't need to - there's no sick people *to* test. The countries that actually instituted sensible lockdown procedures and sustained them for long enough to be effective (Canada included) saw huge drops in the virus counts and have since managed to keep the case numbers at a manageable level. Countries that put major efforts into contact tracing have been able to quickly isolate and quarantine anyone exposed, thus reducing the number of tests they've done. Meanwhile, in the US, a scattershot response and general negative attitude towards basically anything that would help combat the virus is ensuring it continues to run rampant there, with 5+ million infected, 160,000+ dead and no end in sight.

MartianManchild posted...

I would guarantee that if Canada had performed 68 million tests, their numbers would be in the millions too.

Ah, here's the problem - I've found another person who can't do basic math. I count at least three problems with your hilarious mangling of numbers:

1) If Canada had done 68 million tests, that would imply that they had tested every single person in the country approximately twice. They would have tested more, in terms of a percentage of their population, than anyone on the planet. And not just a little bit more either - counting countries with a population of at least 1 million, Canada would have tested more than triple the amount of the next country in line on basis of population (the UAE, which has tested a mere ~59% of their population).

2) Related to the above, you failed to correct for population, which gives a radically skewed impression of the data. On a population-adjusted basis, Canada has tested a little over half as much as the US (Canada has tested ~122k per million compared to ~208k per million for the Americans). If Canada was failing as hard as America was at addressing the virus and tests really did correlate to case numbers, you would expect that Canada would have roughly half as many cases as the US on a per-capita basis (and even that's being generous, because the tests are not randomized and would be more likely to have a higher positivity rate, assuming they were being prioritized on serious cases in this hypothetical); in reality, Canada has about a fifth of the cases per capita.

3) If Canada had "millions" (plural) of people infected with the virus, that would be roughly one in every ten Canadians infected, which would result in a massive spike in hospitalizations and deaths as well as rapidly turning the country into a giant plague cauldron, since once that much of the population had been infected there would be no stopping massive community transmission of the disease without hyper-aggressive quarantining and medical triage. The US has 5 million infections and 160,000 dead as a result; if Canada had that many people dying, I think we'd probably notice something was up. Since that plainly hasn't happened, I'm forced to conclude that your "guarantee" is full of shit.

Do you right-wingers actually think before you make your posts or do you just say the first thing that comes into your head without bothering to check if it has any basis in fact?

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