Governments Must Ramp Up COVID-19 Testing, Says WHO

The World Health Organization warns that a lack of data on how many people have the disease could undermine containment and mitigation efforts in many countries.

Written byCatherine Offord

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The World Health Organization is urging governments to perform more tests for COVID-19 following concerns about underreporting of cases in many countries around the globe. As the number of confirmed deaths due to infections with SARS-CoV-2 passed 8,000 this week, more and more nations have introduced strict measures to attempt to delay the virus’s spread, but the organization warns that assessing the impact of these measures will only be possible with accurate data on the disease.

The message to every government and health authority on the planet right now is “get the capacity, and test, test, test,” Margaret Harris of the WHO coronavirus response team tells Sky News. “If you don’t know you’ve got a fire, you can’t put it out.”

Some countries have been taking a proactive approach to testing. South Korea, which has a population of more than 51 million people, rapidly implemented the ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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