Yeah, I think that Kuwait has totally binned the rapid tests. I don’t know if anyone having had one since April or May when the health ministry got ripped by the rest of the government for buying a bunch that didn’t work at all and then a study here found that the ones they had were giving 50% detection at best. I think the idea of using it for schools is sound and we definitely looked into it in the summer as a route for us to reopen but it entirely depends on reliability. If it’s not reliable then you’re actually taking a greater risk.
The big game changer here was first a three week national lockdown, with curfews on either side of that. That cut positive rates massively during the first spike and got it relatively under control. They went from over a thousand positives a day to about 150 during that time. There’s an old saying in Arabic that is something like “cauterisation is cure”, meaning in any crisis you first stop the bleeding before you try to find your way out. The next was when it started to spike again, they introduced a home quarantine system based around facial recognition with unbelievably harsh penalties. They have an old infectious diseases law which has seen people deported, fined or jailed for up to ten years. At the same time they made masks mandatory everywhere. I can look out my window right now and see people walking alone outside and they are all wearing masks. It’s overkill for sure, but it’s effectiveness is indisputable at this point.
There’s also several jobs (non-healthcare, mostly delivery drivers and popular restaurant chains) where part of the agreement for them to open was random testing of their workforce. Testing, isolation, tracing and masks. It works. It’s exhausting, but until vaccines are widely available everywhere, what else do we have?
