I talked a bit in a previous post about how nerds mostly don't rule the world. One of the big issues is that we think that we live in a world of facts, but most of humanity lives in a world of opinions masquerading as facts. And if enough people believe them then for political purposes they are facts. Politicians get their way in large messure by controlling the way people understand things; spin doctoring works at least some of the time. Which is why message control looms large in the minds of politicians.
But there are some things you can't message your way out of.
When you hear politicians complaining that too much testing is the problem you know they're locked in a mindset where messaging is more important to them than reality. They aren't making any progress in asserting their view of things because of the relentless drumbeat of daily figures, so rather than addressing the hard problem they try to just get rid of the reporting. Rather like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall; which is to say "Daft as a bush".
Consdier, if you will, what we could do with enough data.
If we could test everyone all at once, we would have a very powerful tool for isolating the virus. Given that we can't do that, if we could at least test everyone who had been in contact with known carriers we would have nearly as good a grip, which is the point of contact tracing (note how quickly South Korea contained their initial outbreak as an example).
What we can actually accomplish is a lot less powerful, and without some help from the population at large it may not be enough to choke off the transmission, but asking for less data is the best way to guarantee that we don't stop this thing.
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