CoronaVirus: Does data justify mass testing?
As the world faces the brunt of the Chinese Coronavirus caused Covid19 disease there are calls for indiscriminate testing to be carried out by each country to detect cases. While I am not a epidemiologist or statistician, I ventured an amateur look into whether indiscriminate testing makes sense. I had carried out these workings based on data of about 10 days back but believe that it may still hold true. Readers are of course encouraged to update the data and even the methodology to share newer insights into this question. I plotted data for 55 countries on two parameters: a) Number of tests carried out b) Number of cases detected and plotted the result on a regression line below: The number of interest in the above chart is the R2 (aka R-squared) data point. R2 in simple terms tells us what % of the data is explained by the regression equation (y=0.1623x+377.4). Basically if rise in tests had a strong relation to the number of cases being detected, the