CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

I didnt start digging until 2/19; when my daughter went to a clinic for something that "wasn't flu or strep"; and there was no answer about "is there a test for the new wulan virus?"

The CDC screwing up wouldn't have been so bad without the FDA. I'm just going to quote Scott Alexander here[1] (supporting links in original):

"No problem so bad overregulation can’t make it worse:

So far the government has bungled its coronavirus response pretty egregiously.

Most hospitals have the equipment in house to detect coronavirus. But the FDA banned them from using it. They said all coronavirus tests needed FDA approval, and refused to approve anything except the official test made by the CDC.

Unfortunately, the official CDC test was defective. The test itself worked, but one component in the test kit was broken. Most hospitals had their own supply of this component and could have substituted it in, but the way the FDA approved the CDC test banned them from doing this.

The CDC tried as hard as it could to fix their broken tests quickly, but they weren’t able to do it fast enough to satisfy demand. In order to ration the scarce tests, they mandated that hospitals only test people who had recently been to China, or been in close contact with someone who had.

This was a disaster. For example, here’s a story from a person who traveled to Japan, where the coronavirus is active. He came back to the US, started developing symptoms, and went to a hospital. The hospital said since he hadn’t been to China, they couldn’t test him, and sent him home (he voluntarily quarantined after discharge, so thanks).

But even worse, the policy ruled out by fiat ever being able to detect when the epidemic spread to the US. So in mid-February, when a patient with no history of travel to China came to a hospital in California with coronavirus symptoms, the doctors had to ask the CDC for special permission to test. The CDC dithered for four days before granting the permission, during which nobody put any work into containing the disease. Finally the test came back positive – after some health workers had already been infected.

There were many points where this could have been avoided. A better CDC could have made tests that worked from the beginning, or ramped up production of working tests faster, or come up with smarter criteria for rationing tests. But it would have been even better to have a system where things don’t have to go perfectly, and where a few mistakes don’t choke up the entire response to an epidemic for weeks. If we hadn’t let our culture reach the point where governments ban things by default and review at leisure, and where individual iniative is frowned upon in favor of waiting for official permission to do the right thing, we could have recovered from all of these mistakes. Hospitals would have used their existing tests which they already have more than enough of, doctors would have had permission to test suspicious cases at their discretion, and we would have had a chance to catch infections early before they could spread. If the government didn’t already regulate adrenaline, buspirone, insulin, and genetic testing to the point of near-unavailability, maybe people would have thought it was weirder, or raised more of a fuss, when they started doing it for coronavirus tests.

If you don’t trust me, trust former FDA director Scott Gottleib, who explains the situation here in an unusually candid communication from an ex-government official talking about his former agency. His Twitter feed is a great source of information in general.

And here’s a more careful analysis of some of the laws around diagnostic testing and how they contributed to the current crisis. And by more careful, I mean it ends with “Bottom line: the FDA is going to kill us all”."

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-spec...

Have you considered that people are looking at you not because they want to shame you, but because they're trying to determine if you're sick and they should be extra careful around you, e.g. don't touch anything you've touched, etc?

If the guidance so far has been to only wear a mask if you're sick, it seems reasonable to assume that someone wearing a mask is more likely to be sick than average.

I will do some reading, but it is my thinking that they had stockpiled them, pre-crash. Will update.

to be explicit, GS has no other purpose to stockpile other than they anticipated... better than hospitals.

EDIT: There are a few stories saying the stockpiled pre-crash. Though some claim they had them since the swine-flu epidemic in 2009. Given the read I had on how the markets might respond, and how much information there was screaming that China's economy had stopped (for example I couldn't get circuit boards etc)... I would bet a lot of money they called this a few weeks before.

[1] https://www.cbs58.com/news/donations-of-respirator-masks-and... [2] https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/goldman-gives-face-masks-t... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/financial-institutions-share-st...

These problems are not due to an "administration". The rot of American institutions is deep. The competence and coherence of the entire American civil service and civil life has fallen precipitously in the last 20 years, and, in part because of their irrational fixation on this administration, people still cannot wrap theirs head around the fact that problem is in personnel and structure.

The CDC botched the development & rollout of a pretty simple PCR assay. The CDC happily participated in the 'don't test, don't tell' cover-up of the real # of stateside cases. The CDC and FDA were in territorial pissing matches with one another around test regulation. The FDA has hindered the effective deployment of tests and therapies at every turn. The entire journalistic chattering class was lecturing the American public no more than 2 weeks ago about how over-reacting to the virus or calling it the wrong name was more dangerous than the virus itself. The American economy spent the last 3 decades moving every single manufacturing facility and shred of know-how that could make PPE, ventilators, and pharmaceutical precursors overseas to save a few pennies, and wasn't stopped by the government. And we've now learned Congress was given an accurate assessment of the pandemic threat months ago and chose to... sell their private stocks.

This crisis is not going to result in happy little vision-less "to-do list" for future bureaucrats to improve upon, it is deepening the American people's awareness that the entire bureaucracy & elite class have been shown wanting and must be replaced in their entirety by massive reform of the federal civil service.