Michael norton, Sept. 4 and 6:
I don’t know the reasoning behind various governments’ testing policies. I guess that different governments issued different budgets, and the current levels of testing are the results.
Yes, the UK is finding more cases than France because it is testing more; the deaths and numbers of people in hospital are better indicators of overall prevalence than is testing because testing misses the majority of cases.
Testing is useful to the epidemiologists for developing their understanding of the spread, and for predicting regional hospital demand.