Germany was quick to see the threat while South Korea took an aggressive approach

Countries have approached coronavirus testing in different ways, and in some places there was far earlier recognition than in the UK of the need to develop tests and kits and to have sufficient numbers stockpiled. Here is how some countries got ahead of the curve.

China

With its experience of Sars at the start of the century and as the apparent source of origin of Covid-19, it is perhaps unsurprising that China is ahead of others on testing. By the end of March it had conducted well over 320,000 tests.

One of the earliest tests was developed in mainland China by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and details of it were posted on the World Health Organization website on 24 January, just after the Wuhan lockdown was announced.

A Hong Kong team that helped identify Sars worked to develop its own test. “Because we have gone through all these events in the past, we know how important it is to have a working diagnostic test,” said Leo Poon, who led the team. “That’s why we basically tried to get the work done as soon as possible.”

As one of the world’s major chemicals producers, China was able to quickly accelerate production of kits.

Germany

Germany’s preparedness was helped in part by a recognition that coronavirus was likely to become a global problem. While most countries were slow in dusting off pandemic preparedness plans, in early January a scientist in Berlin, Olfert Landt, recognised the similarity to Sars and realised a test kit would be needed.

Lacking a gene sequence for the new coronavirus, Landt and his company designed their first test kit based on Sars and other known coronaviruses. The protocol was published by the WHO on 17 January, before the Chinese test. The British government passed on this test. By the end of February Landt had produced 4m kits and was making another 1.5m a week.

As well as having an effective test in mass production, Germany signed up politically to mass testing from the beginning, resulting in it being able to do 12,000 tests daily.

South Korea

South Korea has been among the most aggressive when it comes to testing. In contrast with the early stages in the UK – where Boris Johnson said coronavirus was likely to “spread a bit more” – South Korean health officials quickly learned the lessons from Wuhan that the new virus was extremely contagious and could spread rapidly over a wide area.

The country prioritised identifying and isolating people testing positive for the disease, and developed capacity to run about 15,000 diagnostic tests a day. It has conducted more than 300,000 tests to date, free of charge, including in drive-through testing booths since replicated elsewhere.

Iceland

Small and relatively wealthy, the country has a few advantages when it comes to testing, and it has tested a higher proportion of its citizens than anywhere else in the world, including many showing no symptoms of the disease.

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“Iceland’s population puts it in the unique position of having very high testing capabilities with help from the Icelandic medical research company deCode Genetics,” Thorolfur Guðnason, Iceland’s chief epidemiologist, told BuzzFeed. He said the testing effort was “intended to gather insight into the actual prevalence of the virus in the community, as most countries are most exclusively testing symptomatic individuals at this time.”

Italy

After Germany, Italy has done the most testing, with about 200,000 tests. These included all 3,000 residents of the town of Vò, near Venice, in a pilot project designed to see if whole-community testing could help slow the spread of the disease.

Italy showed how widespread testing could be as politically contentious as insufficient testing, with some including the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, initially appearing to blame the country’s high number of infections on the policy of testing people without symptoms. “We have been the first ones with the most rigorous and accurate controls,” Conte said on TV, adding that Italy appeared to have more people infected because “we did more tests”. As it turned out, the tests were an accurate warning of what was coming.