It's not like people are demanding less testing. Public demand for testing is as high as it's possible to be. Test capability is being ramped up as quickly as possible, but even if we manage to double it every month, it will be February of 2021 before we can test everyone once a week.

No, there could be more public demand for testing. Just to take an example, instead of armed protesters demanding reopening, they could be protesting for a better public health response.

Test capability is not being ramped up as quickly as possible. Other countries with less wealth than we have are still able to test more people per capita. The federal government has been hesitant to use powers and financial capabilities that it uniquely has in order to ramp up testing more quickly. A lot is being left on the table here. But it's not what we're talking about because the distraction campaign is working. It's really a bummer.

We don't need to test everyone, just the subset of people who may have been exposed. And we need a lot more tracing to find those likely exposures from known positive cases.

I don't understand why people act like there is some law of nature that is forcing this to be so much worse here than in some other places. There are countries who are not struggling as much as us, we could be more like them, we just aren't doing the work to get there.

If we double it every month, since right now we're testing ~275,000 a day, we'd hit Harvard's estimate of the minimum necessary tests of 500,000 a day in less than a month. The thing that continues to be frustrating about this debate is that we have reasonably clear, achievable guidelines for getting numbers under control and, at least at a national level, we're just not doing them, because the federal response has been a bungled mess.