If you don’t test, you won’t find cases.
After all this time only six US states are testing for the coronavirus.
The following story is based on ProPublica interviews with state and local public health officials and scientists across the country, which, taken together*, describe a frustrating, bewildering bureaucratic process that seemed at odds with the urgency of the growing threat*.
Please consider Key Missteps at the CDC Have Set Back Its Ability to Detect the Potential Spread of Coronavirus
As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test.
The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.
The CDC announced on Feb. 14 that surveillance testing would begin in five key cities, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle. That effort has not yet begun.
The CDC could have authorized the test just for the coronavirus, but no. It wanted everything to work even though everything but the coroinavirus test was useless.
That delay alone added at least 10 days to testing.
The CDC’s decision to create its own test added weeks.
“We’re weeks behind because we had this problem,” said Scott Becker, chief executive officer of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents 100 state and local public laboratories. “We’re usually up-front and center and ready.”
On Wednesday, under pressure from health experts and public officials, the CDC and the FDA told labs they no longer had to worry about the portion of the test intended “for the universal detection of SARS-like coronaviruses.” After three weeks of struggle, they could now use the test purely to check for the presence of COVID-19.
Never underestimate bureaucratic stupidity. And the test is still not working.
“Testing for coronavirus is not available yet in New York City,” city Department of Health spokeswoman Stephanie Buhle said in an email late Thursday. “The kits that were sent to us have demonstrated performance issues and cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate result.”
Only 6 States Testing
Until the middle of this week, only the CDC and the six state labs — in Illinois, Idaho, Tennessee, California, Nevada and Nebraska — were testing patients for the virus, according to Peter Kyriacopoulos, APHL’s senior director of public policy. Now, as many more state and local labs are in the process of setting up the testing kits, this capacity is expected to increase rapidly.
Janet Hamilton, senior director of Policy and Science at Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, said that with the virus spreading through multiple countries, “now is the time” for widespread surveillance testing.
“The disease,” she said, “is moving faster than the data.”
More CDC Stupidity
Doctors at the University of California, Davis Medical Center, where the patient is being treated, said testing was delayed for nearly a week because the patient didn’t fit restrictive federal criteria, which limits tests only to symptomatic patients who recently traveled to China.
“Upon admission, our team asked public health officials if this case could be COVID-19,” UC Davis said in a statement. UC Davis officials said because neither the California Department of Public Health nor Sacramento County could test for the virus, they asked the CDC to do so. But, the officials said, “since the patient did not fit the existing CDC criteria for COVID-19, a test was not immediately administered.”
Idiocy at the University of Washington Medical Center
Compounding the idiocy at the CDC, the FDA got into the act.
Alexander Greninger, an assistant professor in laboratory medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center, said after he submitted his COVID-19 test, which copies the CDC protocol, to the FDA, a reviewer asked him to prove that his test would not show a positive result for someone infected with the SARS coronavirus or the MERS coronavirus — an almost ridiculous challenge. The SARS virus, which appeared in November 2002, affected 26 countries, disappeared in mid-2003 and hasn’t been seen since.
Don’t blame Greninger.
Someone at the FDA was worried about the test showing a positive for the coronavirus when the person really had SARS or MERS.
FDA Idiocy
There are labs that can create parts of a SARS virus, but the FDA’s recommended supplier of such materials said it would need one to two months to provide a sample, Greninger said. He spent two days on the phone making dozens of calls, scrambling to find a lab that would provide what he needed.
Greninger said the FDA was treating labs as if they were trying to make a commercially distributed product. “I think it makes sense to have this regulation,’’ he said, when “you’re going to sell 100,000 widgets across the U.S. That’s not who we are.”
Media Funnel and Censorship
All questions to the CDC and FDA related to the coronavirus must now go through Vice President Mike Pence. But he is not talking.
Pence did not respond to ProPublica questions.
What We Know, and Don’t
We do not know who made the decision to design a more complicated test or to depart from the WHO guidance.
We do know there is blatant incompetence at the CDC and FDA, and government censorship of officials.
What’s Happening Background
- Feb 19: Fed Minutes Highlight Coronavirus Concerns and Uncertainty 8 Times
- Feb 24: Bond Yields Crash and Gold Soars on Pandemic Threat
- Feb 25: CDC Admits Spread of Coronavirus in the US Appears Inevitable
- Feb 25: Lie of the Day: This is Not a Pandemic
- Feb 25: Nearly 50% Odds of “At Least” 3 Rate Cuts by December
- Feb 26: Trump says We are “Very, Very Ready for the Coronavirus, for Anything”
- Feb 27: Useless Act: California Monitors 8,400 People for Coronavirus; 33 Test Positive
- Feb 27: Containment Fails: Coronavirus Tweets of the Day
- Feb 27: Tweets of the Day: Iran’s VP Infected, Japan Closes All Schools
Please recall on Wednesday evening President Trump addressed the nation stating “We are Very, Very Ready for the Coronavirus, for Anything“.
What an amazing lie.
Here’s the question of the day: When do we rename the FDA the Federal Death Agency?
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
First American death in the state of Washington. I suggest we update the definition of Caucasian to exclude Americans and Italians. That will keep number of Caucasian death to zero. Thoughts?
If you look at the worldometers chart of cases outside of China, and switch to the log chart, you can see that the line has turned upwards. It took 20 days to get from 100 to 1,000 cases. It appears that it will take 13 days to get from 1,000 to 10,000, and based on the rate the last few days it will take only 10 days to get from 10,000 to 100,000. That would put us at 10m cases outside of China by the end of March.
The US currently accounts for 1.2% of the cases outside of China, and if that remains constant, that would mean about 120,000 cases in the US by the end of March. Now, with a 5% critical rate, that means 6,100 people in critical condition. If the death rate is 1%, it would mean 1,100 deaths by the end of March. If that growth continued through April, the US healthcare system would break by the middle of April.
Based on the slower spread of Coronavirus in tropical regions, there is reason to believe that the rate will soon slow down. In the US, the flu season typically peaks from December to February, but can run as late as May. Thus, the above projections are unlikely to happen. More likely we will end up closer to 60k cases in the US by the end of March and 100k by the end of April. However, that is more than enough seeded cases to assure that when it starts spreading again in the Fall, it could be really bad if there is no vaccine.
Anyone that believes that the US has it completely contained should obviously wonder why we saw new cases of community transmission in California, Oregon, and Washington state in the last day or so. We’ll see more soon, unfortunately.
I’m looking at seasonal charts for flu as proxy for nCoV. The southen hemisphere is going to be something of an inverse of the northern. So here are links that have charts, I’ll start with a pessimistic one for US from wiki for 2009 epidemic
China
Asia regions
Nigeria
India
So the possibilities of how pandemic would unfold are hard to calculate.
Here is an article that was examining seasonality of viruses, and the answer is that they really don’t know. Two other coronaviruses are seasonal, OC43, and 229E. On the other hand, sometimes viruses like the Spanish flu don’t play by the rules.
Thanks – as a guess, because it seems highly transmissible I don’t think nCov will play by the rules.
Interesting. That was exactly my thinking as well. No one really knows why some stop spreading at the end of “flu season”, but it would seem that the more transmissible it is, the less likely it is to go away.
Trump says he can bring in coronavirus experts quickly. The experts say it is not that simple. WaPo. All the way at the end:
“If you don’t test, you won’t find cases.” IMHO that reflects very much what the US and some other countries with low Corvid cases are doing.
Maybe you folks are learning fast from the chinese, koreans, italians and japanese: why test and be exposed to all sorts of worldwide scrutiny and widespread panic when you can give excuse that the test kits arent perfectly ready yet?
Its quite telling when a country under the current circumstances are delaying testing because people are worried that these tests, fully capable of detecting Corvid19, arent able to prove they are not flagging out SARS or MERS instead. Folks just dont want to look bad with more cases than some third world country. At the end, whether a patient has SARS, MERS or Corvid19, wouldnt you want to know immediately and isolate the patient from society?
The flaw with this logic is that we have seen the result of not testing. Iran and Italy went down that road. Any other country that is not testing the right people will end up in the same situation. Within a week or two there will be enough cases that it can no longer be contained, and that people start dying. If the US, for example, has cases they should be testing, and they aren’t, it will soon be obvious.
A central pillar of fully financialized retardtopias, is the indoctrination of their captive dronelings into the belief that those who have received unusually large welfare checks from The Fed, did so because they are somehow “smarter” than the average homeless guy. In the jargon, it’s referred to as legitimizing privilege.
Now, since the indoctrination effort appears to have largely been successful, dunces of all stripes no doubt walk around believing Mnuchin and Kudlow are somehow “smart”, or “good at” something. Aside from collecting welfare, even. Hence, they are someone “we” should listen to.
Let’s be brutally honest. The appointment of Mnuchin and Kudlow as 2 of the 3 top people sends a clear and unambiguous message. The message is “The coronavirus is not something we care about or are concerned with. The real danger is the falling stock market.”
In my opinion, the reason the stock market is falling is because it is not clear that the US is taking the coronavirus threat seriously. Rather that halting the fall, it would seem that this should make it worse. With each crazy action by the Trump administration I am more convinced that the coronavirus will soon be growing rapidly in the US, and that the Democrats will win a massive landslide in the fall due the to complete and utter failure of the Trump administration to even act like they care whether people die of coronavirus. It totally blows my mind that they don’t care, but they obviously don’t, and they don’t care if we know it.
What evidence is there that the US gov is doing less than can be expected of any gov? I would guess most of the individuals in the CDC bureaucracy are doing the best that they can. High pressure and impossible deadlines with huge unknowns are difficult in even the least dysfunctional organisations.
It is a lesson in transparency though. CDC makes a call for own PCR kit, the others on offer were known inconclusive for all I know, and is delayed – mistakes happen – but then you explain what is going on and why so you have public understanding not speculation. Same goes with control measures, you explain real official projections of pandemic and reasoning based on those, you allow society to judge the decisions. That is called responsibility where you pay the cost, because you know whatever choice you make it will be criticised by many already and you accept that, because you know already society is expecting the impossible, has been promised that.
The choice of management however across bureaucracy is to avoid taking obvious responsibility but instead on being seen to act when those actions are without doubt seen as a help, even if that is just clearing up an outbreak that could feasibly have been avoided.
So, the responsibility is that of society as a whole, because that is what our circumstance or management has evolved into. In other words, if it is not our very own management, why are we even paying attention to it or expecting from it in the first place?
So it is not a partisan thing really, the constraints are impossible to reconciliate and I expect any politician would be making errors of one kind or another at this point. For example, is there one country decided to fully quarantine itself from the virus, or that has wide testing ready as the epidemic first starts ?
You should read some stories of test kits in Africa, or how about EU
” It was also revealed that Italian health officials are being ‘forced’ by the ECDC to make changes in their testing protocols, a move that may slow the growth of new coronavirus case numbers. The country is required to limit coronavirus testing to at-risk people showing symptoms of COVID-19, said Dr Giuseppe Ippolito, scientific director at Italy’s National Institute for Infectious Diseases.
Previously, Italy was testing anyone who visited certain towns in northern Italy or came into contact with someone infected with the coronavirus but not necessarily showing symptoms.
Dr Ippolito said the shift corresponds with so called ‘updated recommendations’ from the ECDC or European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Spain has earlier revealed how the EU and ECDC has prevented it from reporting to the public and media about coronavirus cases in its country by citing regulatory technicalities involving classification and definition of coronaviruses cases despite all nucleic acid tests confirming the infected cases.
Media personnel are now questioning as to whether there is a ‘coverup’ or ‘downplay’ that is being orchestrated through a concerted efforts of the UN, WHO, EU and ECDC. ” (thailandmedical.news)
So, have to look out for yourselves a bit here.
No more worries. We’re safe now. Pence has chosen his three key assistants, two of which are Larry Kudlow, and Steve Mnuchin. With their expertise and experience in pandemic containment, we are in good hands.
/sarc
New case reported in Santa Clara. Another “community” transmission. The sharing economy is going well.
The fastest, most effective action to take was to quarantine the US. Halt all flights. Cruise ships would have to go remain offshore with the merchant marine delivering fresh food and supplies. Too many elected officials were thinking with their campaign contributors’ donations instead of the lives they were sworn to protect.
China numbers don’t add up, unless you do some funny ‘weighted averages’ with demographics that I’m not privy too. See story below.
Also note Friday’s new numbers in China are 329 over the last 24 hours, the “lowest in a month” with 329 new cases, but notice on 2/18, about ten days ago, we also had almost the same “low daily new case number” and it jumped up in the subsequent days. Time will tell if the same thing happens now. See chart here: https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
Note crude death rate: 2.8/82 = 3.4%
RayLopez
A recent study from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) analyzing 72,314 coronavirus cases in mainland China found that while about 80 percent of cases are mild, the virus poses the greatest threat to elderly people with preexisting health issues.
The research shows patients older than the age of 80 had a 14.9 percent chance of dying after being infected, while those in their 70s were found to have an 8 percent chance of death. Patients in their 50s were about three times more likely to die than patients in their 40s, at a rate of 1.3 percent.
Patients ages 10 to 19 were as likely to die as patients in their 30s, at just 0.2 percent. The study did not report any deaths in children younger than 10, who represented less than 1 percent of patients.
The study collected data from confirmed patients through Feb. 11 and is one of the largest such samples in a study of its kind.
The risk of dying dramatically increased among patients in their 70s and 80s as many in this age group are more likely to have preexisting health conditions.
Coronavirus patients with heart disease had a 10 percent mortality rate, while those with diabetes had around a 7 percent mortality rate.
Men were also found to have a 2.8 percent fatality rate, versus 1.7 percent for women, according to the study. The overall fatality rate in China was 2.3 percent.
Scientists say there are a number of factors that could be contributing to why men are more vulnerable in the current epidemic. Some are biological — for example, women have a stronger immune response to viral infections particularly of the respiratory tract — and some are rooted in lifestyle, The New York Times reports. In China, for instance, men smoke in much greater numbers than women.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday people aged 60 and older and have an underlying condition like cardiovascular disease, respiratory condition and diabetes have a risk of developing severe COVID-19. WHO recommended these people avoid crowded areas or places where they might interact with people who are sick.
WHO reported Friday there are more than 82,000 cases worldwide, with more than 2,800 deaths. The majority of cases occurred in China, where the outbreak originated. Health officials said Friday China reported 329 new cases in the past 24 hours, the lowest in over a month.
I’m not trusting any numbers for now, because there is both exageration and false security to be had, they also sometimes go together.
My update, and I’ll post it here because I don’t have an independent reply window, is on how fast the virus spreads once it finds its way into community. I don’t think Wuhan is the destination for most, maybe more like a lower continuous background and restrictions. Some countries won’t have the privilege of being able to organise that also I guess.
So I’m looking at Spain, a couple days ago the first new confirmed case or two appear, via Italy, so they test and trace related or people from Italy with symptoms, and now Spain is at 39 cases, including two doctors and a nurse. It looks like this
Via RTVE
There are cases all over the country appearing, most traceable ultimately to Italy, but I think it is clear how fast the infection spreads. You add in some unknown sources over the last week or two, plus that they will have lost track of some infections from Italy, and you don’t have to be genius to see that the above map is a fraction of cases now, or at least of those that will exist in a weeks time.
Just to say that the epidemic in the west seems to be well under way.
It is hard to believe that in China they have overcome it in any way. Now they seem to have controlled it and at a continuing cost, but it will continue to make life difficult there and I expect there will be bigger outbreaks sporadically. Imagine this going on around the world and it will be very costly and disruptive. I basically accept that is the likely future of this pandemic, so now I am now more concentrated on trying to understand the actual nature of the virus, who it effects and why, and keeping up to date on what events are like on the ground in different places, what approaches authorities are taking and so on.
In Perpignan France you have a 100 000 get together, probably not wise at this point in time
In Greece there are crowds as you would know
It is not a great stretch to imagine pandemic in Turkey and migrant/refugees unwanted there because of that. The incentive to reach EU would be much higher.
Not a happy picture.
One other thing that I find troublesome with stats is that they can be used to cover outlying realities, like long incubation. So we seem to be presented with a lower CFR for younger generations, roughly what the flu would be for the population as a whole including older generation – I don’t see how this can be reassuring. Why , even if this were the case, and even if a person is younger so comparatively better off ? Because this virus has properties that we should fear, because how it works or what it is capable of is different and not well understood.
Like I mentioned previously my attention is with these outlying realities, younger healthy patients succumbing to it for no particular reason, the possibility that it reinfects, or activates when a person is weaker and so on. In short it seems that it is stealthy towards immunity, and when it does take off properly it is often lethal, no matter age. I don’t like this, it means it is capable of overiding the ability of average people to survive it. Exactly what is going on is unknown, and so we should be very cautious.
In Italy 10% of recorded infections are of medical workers (ANSA) , so we imagine how that might play out as the epidemic expands.
Also there are two unresolved cases there I noted, a possibly unrelated seventeen month old fatality from pneumonia type who had to travel to different hospitals after being rejected by one , a manslaughter case.
Another possibly unrelated is a three year old with very high fever.
Already it is understood that there are different strains appearing, even if WHO says “it doesn’t seem to be changing”.
In short I really don’t like how this is all evolving, not out of panic or anything, I just have an uneasy feeling about what we are being presented as a reality/”reality”, and what the handling says of our authorities (in any country).
Never underestimate the capacity of a bureaucracy to slow down anything it touches.
Or speed it up. The South Korean “bureaucracy” has now managed to test upward to 10K a day. They even now have a drivethrough for people. You can be in and out in 10 minutes and it’s all free.
Look for Twitter handle: koryodynasty for an example of how this works.
I can’t post a link because my post will just get blocked.
And obviously Singapore and Taiwan have been quite successful in containment thanks to “bureaucracy”.
Only in America, things get reduced to left/right, bureaucracy/non bureaucracy. As if real life is that simple.
We are as ready as any other country is what Trump really meant. This is true because most medical research still happens in the United States. Of course the maybe the world hasn’t seen anything like this before but just because you are ready doesn’t mean anything. It is like being a vegetarian and expecting not to get eaten by animals.
maybe you should spend more time observing because casual observance isn’t learning you much.
The problem that China has right now is that a portion of people recovered from the illness still carry the virus and can infect others.
How would China allow free-travel to people who can infect others? It would just allow the fire to start all over again in a new population.
Sounds like this would be a long-term damper on the economy.
You never know how bad the incompetence gets in the “easy” times unfortunately. Even Lincoln had to weed out the career appointed buddy-buddy losers during the Civil War.
Yes, and unfortunately fate doesn’t play video snapshots of coming attractions. Had the swaggering, blustering gang sent to the Willard hotel to work out a deal to prevent war been treated to two seconds each of the worst of the killing at Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg and Cold Harbor, they would all have gone to their rooms, put on dry pants and come back eager to endorse Lincoln’s plan to buy out the slaves with 50 year bonds.
But hey, in the all important pre-outbreak PR phase of the coronavirus fight, the leader of the fight has important business in Florida–speech to a conservative group this morning and a fundraiser this afternoon.
Hope the actual worker-bees know how to get him on the phone if there were an actual crisis he had to respond to. Because it is clear that nothing can happen without approval from the top.
What the CDC tried to do with too little, too late should have been started on a Manhattan project scale in 2003, when SARS made it blatantly apparent that the world had no early detection and warning system for coronaviruses, five of the seven now known to exist have been discovered since the turn of the century.
Thus far, none of them have appeared to give a damn who’s in the White House.
If this additional unearned opportunity to get our act together degenerates into just another election year gong show and cat fight, our tsetse fly attention spans may kill us all yet.
We still had none when Ebola hit 11 years later in Africa.
It’s not a Trump problem; it’s our tsetse fly attention span problem.
Real problems and real solutions don’t get the credit many bureaucrats and people want and need. In the end, if you stop a pandemic no one would really find out that you did because the pandemic never happened in the first place.
That’s why we are better than China …. NOT!!!!
We don’t need censors, when we have this level of incompetence. Also, where are the vaunted market players? Mask prices are through the roof, so there should be companies making masks now right, right?
Instead, according to Reuters, the government is considering invoking the Defense Production Act to rapidly expand domestic manufacturing of protective masks and clothing to combat the coronavirus in the United States, two U.S. officials told Reuters.
This coronavirus makes fun of both governments and the “market”. ROFL. FUN, FUN, FUN.
“Mask prices are through the roof, so there should be companies making masks now right, right?”
…
Yeah, …well … due to globalization mask making offshored.
China makes (or should I say DID) half the masks in the global market. Good luck ramping up local production on short notice.
Not only that, we’ve also offshored the production of many critical medicines. But I am sure, the market worshippers will respond to this with: “we need to offshore even more!!!!”
Looks, I am one of those who thinks government is great, the market sucks or vice versa. But people who think that there is this thing called “XXX” that will make everything great with no downside whatsoever need to have their heads examined.
Also, Trump defanged the CDC, which is not mentioned by Mish.
Understandable points but classic economics say when scarcity exists, prices go up, it’s pretty textbook. As for “money in fighting pandemics” actually the big drug companies, reported Tyler Cowen a week or so ago at MarginalRevolution, have said that the government asking them to ‘drop everything and develop a vaccine’ is actually disruptive in a bad way to their business models, in other words, there’s no real ‘big money’ in developing a vaccine. For one thing, the vaccine so developed will almost certainly be nationalized and drug companies will just barely cover their costs, for another, it costs money to “drop everything” and work on an unrelated project. Just look at the way most of us work: when a client or partner interrupts our work flow and asks is to drop everything and solve some problem that was ‘due yesterday’ I find such efforts highly disruptive to my workflow and I try and get additional compensation, which often is not forthcoming. Such clients/partner are the proverbial pain in the backsides.
What is needed is a permanent “pandemic response team” of companies that is compensated at a cost plus contract basis by the federal government, IMO, so it actually “pays well” to find a vaccine quickly. Look at the team that found the Ebola vaccine. Other than praise, and kudos, and a pat on the back, who really gives a flying bat’s a** about it? I bet the company or team did not really make a lot of money off that world-saving vaccine. Probably the team that invented the anti-balding drug Rogaine made a lot more money. A whole lot more.
“Understandable points but classic economics say when scarcity exists, prices go up, it’s pretty textbook.”
…
Absolutely. But scarcity in this case means NO product. Two places this morning had no masks. The person at Lowes laughed and said they were out nationwide … and to put a t shirt over my mouth. Uh, thanks. Globalization – in this instance – will likely mean more infected in US than if production domestic. Even if China not off line, the time for them to made there and shipped here likely too late.
In Europe they are out, public actually being told not to buy because the doctors are short , countries asking others for supplies (not likely).
Rowenta make dust bags for vacuum cleaners, using N100 fabric (99.997% 0.3 micron) if you are creative, but no guarantee included – I had bought some for an older HVAC project, they were still on sale around here :/ .
It is perfectly possible to develop a vaccine fast, that can be sold inexpensively, and still have the company that develops it profit. Use government to incentivize it, but let private companies do the work. Suppose Trump offered a $1b prize to the first effective vaccine that passed safety tests, but then after payment of the prize, the government got rights to it, and could license it out for manufacturing and distribution, and set the price.
While you may get something out of weird schemes like that (after all you are spending a billion..); for one, your assigned five year planner doesn’t know what “safe” and “effective” in an unknown field means. And noone, until lots of people have tried, knows what “safest” and “most effective” is.
So what you’ll get, is the lowest common denominator product you can get for $100 million worth of real work, and $900 million worth of lobbying, quarreling, suing, bribes; and hookers and blow for the Party members charged with making “the decision.”
No matter how hard totalitarians work at amending Newspeak, with the goal of facilitating five year planners’ attempts at sounding fashionably free-market’y, they’re still just five year planners. No different, at all, from Kim.
Another must read article on this issue here, of incentives for vaccine makers: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/business/an-economic-cure-for-pandemics.html?ref=business&_r=0
Not to excuse bureaucratic clumsiness, but the backdrop for this, is that “tests” currently in use around the world, aren’t paragons of reliability. It’s not a matter of “good” tests laying around, while the CDC decided to, pick the bad ones. Instead, it’s a bit of a hit-and-miss, evolving field on all counts.
The optimal course of action, would be to ask the Chinese for help. They are far and away the ones with the most real world experience at this by now. Their tests are, or at least have been thoughout the outbreak, a bit hit and miss as well, but that ambiguity just makes it even more beneficial to have people with broader real world experience, help interpreting and administering them.
Fat chance an administration, bureaucracy and sycophant army of well indoctrinated dronelings firmly dug into a-priori positions about the Chinese “mishandling” everything, doing so, though.
This isn’t a Trump thing. Although Trump doesn’t help. This is a government thing. Do you really expect a bunch of career bureaucrats to quickly come up with a good logical solution to a new problem? They’re trained to be politicians. Not scientists.
this is a trump thing. the buck stops somewhere and he’s the stop. and he was foolish enough to claim we’re very, very ready, for anything. incompetence at its finest.