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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe Lost Month: How a failure to test blinded the U.S. to COVID-19
Aggressive screening might have helped contain the coronavirus in the United States. But technical flaws, regulatory hurdles and lapses in leadership let it spread undetected for weeks.
By Michael D. Shear, Abby Goodnough, Sheila Kaplan, Sheri Fink, Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland
March 28, 2020, 1:29 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON Early on, the dozen federal officials charged with defending America against the coronavirus gathered day after day in the White House Situation Room, consumed by crises. They grappled with how to evacuate the United States consulate in Wuhan, China, ban Chinese travelers and extract Americans from the Diamond Princess and other cruise ships.
The members of the coronavirus task force typically devoted only five or 10 minutes, often at the end of contentious meetings, to talk about testing, several participants recalled. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, its leaders assured the others, had developed a diagnostic model that would be rolled out quickly as a first step.
But as the deadly virus from China spread with ferocity across the United States between late January and early March, large-scale testing of people who might have been infected did not happen because of technical flaws, regulatory hurdles, business-as-usual bureaucracies and lack of leadership at multiple levels, according to interviews with more than 50 current and former public health officials, administration officials, senior scientists and company executives.
The result was a lost month, when the worlds richest country armed with some of the most highly trained scientists and infectious disease specialists squandered its best chance of containing the viruss spread. Instead, Americans were left largely blind to the scale of a looming public health catastrophe.
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CrispyQ
(36,234 posts)It was at a big medical center & I had heard of the virus by that time & I took precautions. Little did I know that I was taking the threat more seriously than our Federal government.
dewsgirl
(14,961 posts)it snuck up on them?
I'm still angry about the, but the flu narrative that was pushed so hard by almost everyone. Some of us knew better.
uponit7771
(90,225 posts)soryang
(3,299 posts)what a bunch of weasels.
pat_k
(9,313 posts)boston bean
(36,186 posts)He wanted to ignore it cause re election.
He is a major piece of shit.
Igel
(35,197 posts)something like 1/29.
It got one on 2/6 from one company.
It got another on 2/12 from another company.
One had results in as little as 6 hours.
It authorized private clinics and other organizations to administer the test and process the test.
Centralized authority authorized others to do the work for them, and report. And paid for the work. In the US, centralized authority had a test on 2/6 and contracted out manufacture--which was botched. Took all month for the centralized authority to finally say that other groups were authorized to perform the tests. And then longer to authorize privately produced tests.
Yes. Regulations got in the way, along with some botch ups. I'd note that if there's just one line of authority, a screw up in that line is pretty important. If you decentralize and have various approaches, then, well, not so bad. This is a policy problem.
On another note, I just read that China didn't report asymptomatic positives. If you tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 but had no symptoms, you weren't a carrier. Keep that in mind when you read that 30-50% of infections have no detectable symptoms.
Then there was the report that the wonderful Chinese test that was used could miss from 30-50% of positives. So if you're sick with the virus, there's maybe a 6 in 10 chance it'll catch it. And then if you're not showing symptoms, it doesn't matter what the test says. These are data-trustworthiness issues.