Why doesn’t Taiwan launch universal #COVID19 testing - @Taiwan_CDC chief Dr. Chen Shih-Zhong said during today’s daily briefing that while there could asymptomatic patients at the community level, Taiwan’s scientific disease prevention measures can avoid wasting resources ...
... while limiting the impact that the pandemic could have on local communities. He said that while many people think #COVID19 rapid test can filter out all existing cases, the downside of rapid testing is to create more false positive and false negative results.
From an economic perspective, Taiwan will need 4.6 billion NTD in order to test every citizen for #COVID19 through the cheaper rapid test. If Taiwan wants to test every citizen with PCR testing, it will need 69 billion NTD to complete the task.
So far, #Taiwan has tested more than 60,000 people and each test cost around 3000 NTD, bringing the total cost to 1800 million NTD.
Based on #Taiwan official number, only 10 out of the 69000 suspected cases lack clear sources of infection. It proves that identifying all existing patients through universal PCR testing will waste a lot of money and medical resources. Plus it isn’t that effective.
