The cost was raised as a reason for not getting kits . Yet we have an 800m and 1.3b deficit with lots of spending for programs out there. I'm sure they could have snuck in some for test kits.

worldometers.info/coronavirus/

Good website here: we are 113ith in Tests per Million.

"Critics, however, fear that health officials are not testing enough people to give an accurate sense of the spread of COVID-19 in communities."

Is this only a fear of critics? if the government itself thinks its testing enough... I have 10,000,000 test kits to sell you.

Not to mention they are implying of major spending in Works. So any small cut here and there will be offset. Years of not dealing with, unfunded pensions, SOEs, reforms in modernizing the public sector give us little to no room

Which is why I said i*if*.

Who knows what the terms are. For all, we know it could be a very short repayment term. In that case, it would be awful. We just don't know unit we see the details.

if this is a low-interest one-off no strings attached loan, then its a no brainer to take. There is no better time to access it than now.

I don't know when we ever had the headroom.

See Laing in 2013 commenting on the government's VAT approach.

"#Acknowledging that the Government’s finances were- and continue to be - on an unsustainable path due to heavy deficit spending during the recession, Zhivargo Laing, former minister of state for finance, told Tribune Business that an Ingraham administration would have targeted VAT implementation as “an urgent priority”."

"tribune242.com/news/2013/jan/25/fnm-wan…"

You have budgets here and there that have lower deficits, but we are always a US downturn or hurricane away, See Joaquin, Matthew Irma, Dorian etc.

What's worse, the unfunded liabilities that are off-budget. Those numbers dwarf anything in the budget.

Well we added another 15 to the roll. Regis says cost was an issue in acquiring more test kits. I think when all of the bills come and when the budget comes, we would have spent hundreds of millions on everything else from signage and advertising, to Works and public services, to welfare to bailouts to SOEs, etc.

The quagmire is this. If we do roll out mass testing and they do so on the family islands what happens when they find cases? The premise of the selective reopenings is unpinned on "no presence of COVID-19".

Assume we got 50,000 tests and they go to a few of these islands and mass test and realize that actually there are 100 cases across those islands for example, but they're just asymptomatic.

Do they shut t those islands back down and when do you ever lift it back? Furthermore if the premise of those islands reopening is that they have no cases, is that the case for Nassau as well? But again how do you know if you don't test?

I meant "are potential at-risk cases"

How many persons are doing as asked and still get it? You cal still spread the virus doing any quite normal allowed activities. I think NY was saying that many of the cases in Manhattan were from persons who were at home. They simply passed it on to others who they were in close contact with.

Going to a construction site can, ordering delivery, and going to the pharmacy can still cause the spread. Measures are only there to slow it down.

100 confirmed cases are not 100 cases in the country. If we test everyone we'd realize that there can be 1.5x, 2x, 5x 10x, or 20x that number. No one knows unless more testing is done. In reality, we probably have a bunch of healthy carriers going about doing allowed activities passing it around to others who show symptoms.

The only way to know is to test more.