It's not MY scale, it's the worlds scaleYour whole scale up per capita math is a little misleading. Lets take Germany for instance
Germany pop 83 million - lets say your system is set up to test 1% of the pop for sickness at any given time - so 830K of tests. Lets say it is designed to be able to ramp this manufacturing capability 50% - 1,245K tests - an increase of 415K
US pop 330 million - 1% => 3,300K => ramp capability of 50% increase of 1,650K.
Now if we ask - which would you rather go find raw supplies to ramp this up with? Germany at 415K OR THE USA at 1,650K?
Quite the easier job doing that for Germany. Probably are going to be a little more successful.
It is kind of like having 10 people over for Thanksgiving or 40. Maybe the ovens can cook for 10 or 40 but the logistics to do the cooking for 40 and 10 are much different. Our grocery stores are pretty good at not running out of turkeys and stuff because they know it is Thanksgiving, but they sure weren't too good at toilet paper for the corona virus. Probably because they did not know it was coming.
Small countries can ramp up much easier on the supply chain side because they only need a small percentage of the total reserve that is available. Filling their request out of the inventory available isn't nearly as hard as trying to adjust for the increased amount of the largest user, because that overwhelms the supply. Just look at NY and ventilators. Seems like they were having all sorts of problems at first trying to find the number projected. But it didn't seem to be as problematic for many other smaller areas and jurisdictions. Finding 1 is just a hell of a lot easier than finding 10