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

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

#221

Post by barry-cotter »

aazaa wrote: post #121

The damage will be much longer lasting than this. The Chinese bought the US precious weeks to prepare while it locked down vast numbers of its own population. The disaster could have been prevented through a vigorous testing/quarrantine program in Washington and California. At every step of the way the US either bungled testing, or actively discouraged testing. It's been nothing but lies and mistakes from the start.…

> The Chinese bought the US precious weeks to prepare while it locked down vast numbers of its own population.

This could all have been stopped if the CPC had acted earlier, not covered it up, not lied about human to human transmission, not advised that travel restriction and testing were unnecessary.

> Dec. 27: Wuhan health officials are told that a new coronavirus is causing the illness.

> Jan. 1: Wuhan Public Security Bureau brings in for questioning eight doctors who had posted information about the illness on WeChat.

An official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission orders labs, which had already determined that the novel virus was similar to SARS, to stop testing samples and to destroy existing samples.

> Jan. 14: WHO announces Chinese authorities have seen "no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus."

> The bottom line: China is now trying to create a narrative that it's an example of how to handle this crisis when in fact its early actions led to the virus spreading around the globe.

https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coro...

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

#222

Post by robomartin »

JDulin wrote: post #170
aazaa wrote: post #121

The damage will be much longer lasting than this. The Chinese bought the US precious weeks to prepare while it locked down vast numbers of its own population. The disaster could have been prevented through a vigorous testing/quarrantine program in Washington and California. At every step of the way the US either bungled testing, or actively discouraged testing. It's been nothing but lies and mistakes from the start.…

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 developm…

You are being kind. From my perspective, the ineptitude and mismanagement easily goes back 50 years, not 20.

It's sad to see so many people blinded by the hatred aimed at Trump to be completely blind to how it is we got here. A simple example from data that came out today: Governor Cuomo refused to buy 16,000 ventilators in 2015, when he was told they would be needed for an event such as what we are experiencing. Remember this is when Bill Gates was already on TED talking about the next pandemic. And so, today, Cuomo tries to blame their lack of preparedness on the federal government.

The other item you mentioned that is also right on point, is the brutal erosion of our ability to manufacture almost anything at scale. And then you have people, reporters and politicians yelling and screaming about the Trump administration not materializing masks, bed, ventilators and entire hospitals instantly out of thin air.

I mean, we barely make our own molds for plastic injection molding in the US and we are indignant because we can't spin-up industrial scale manufacturing capacity in days? It takes MONTHS, no, YEARS, to integrate some of these supply chains and produce quality product at scale.

Segments of our society, "leadership" and media are acting as if a combination of Superman and Captain Picard are going to swing into action, instantly materialize millions of products we don't have the industrial base to produce and fly around the planet at ludicrous speed in reverse to turn back time.

Well, that's not reality. Reality is we can't make shit in the US any more and it takes a tremendous amount of time to spin up production lines from nothing, particularly if we are talking about life saving devices.

Everyone needs to calm down, stop pointing fingers and find ways to contribute. As the saying goes, "United we Stand". Time to show what that really means or face failure, as the rest of that phrase predicts.

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

#223

Post by eric_cc »

aazaa wrote: post #121

The damage will be much longer lasting than this. The Chinese bought the US precious weeks to prepare while it locked down vast numbers of its own population. The disaster could have been prevented through a vigorous testing/quarrantine program in Washington and California. At every step of the way the US either bungled testing, or actively discouraged testing. It's been nothing but lies and mistakes from the start.…

> The disaster could have been prevented

As in: 100% prevented?

> The administration

and this is where you lost me..

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

#224

Post by dgritsko »

thombat wrote: post #206
Natsu wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

World War 3 supposedly started in January by some accounts, but is nearly forgotten now. What's some mystery flu in China got on that as far as headlines go? Sure, we can answer this with a bit of hindsight, but it's amazing how quickly we forget even wildly incorrect predictions.

Can you expand on thst WW3 reference - it's not a story that made the rounds here.

I think they are referring to the killing of Qasem Soleimani and the subsequent retaliation [1].

[1]: https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/United_States_military_kills_Qa...

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

#225

Post by MikeAmelung »

IggleSniggle wrote: post #215

The CDC is still instructing healthcare providers NOT to test UNLESS a person has either come into contact with a known COVID-19 carrier OR recently traveled abroad. Otherwise, the guideline is "do not test." I am married to a healthcare provider. Nevermind clinical judgement, context, or an abundance of available tests. If you don't meet the above guidelines, my spouse is being firmly instructed by the clinical prac…

Someone needs to update your clinical practice manager with the info from 2 weeks ago:

https://emergency.cdc.gov/han/2020/han00429.asp

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

#226

Post by threatofrain »

Natsu wrote: post #188
H8crilA wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm, yes, skin in the game? Things generally don't improve because people get better. Things generally improve because bad people/groups/corporations/ideas fail. Way more people should be fired / tried / impeached. Need I remind you that nobody went to jail over 2008? It does make the system more healthy. If you're responsible for the health of some country you better be scared , because the consequences are dire, an…

That's effectively the complete opposite of how to actually eliminate errors. The way engineers do it involves depersonalizing it to get away from blame games, assessing all contributing causes, doing proper risk modeling and working to improve the systems so that they rely on human frailty as little as possible. Skin in the game is an easy concept we're all familiar with, but it generally leads to adverse behavior l…

Engineers create systems where individual vigilance is less disastrous, or where vigilance is augmented. The real world and tech world still does rely on brute-force responsibility sometimes, to cover the gaps in a plan where the details were left out.

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

#227

Post by eric_cc »

acqq wrote: post #9
panarky wrote: post #5

Does anyone know actual facts about testing in the US? Yes, the CDC's tests were flawed, but ... 1) Other countries don't have a problem testing millions of people, so why doesn't the US use the same tests they do? 2) 3.5 weeks ago the Trump admin promised 1 million tests that week with many more to follow soon thereafter. After all this time they still haven't materialized, so what happened to the million tests? 3)…

The context matters: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/trumps-statements-about-th... "Feb. 26: “And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero , that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” — Trump at a press conference." "Feb. 27: “ It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” — Trump at a White House meeting with African American…

Wait are you really blaming Trump because he made stupid comments?

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

#228

Post by AlexCoventry »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #105
cadlin wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good systems would obviously be desirable, but this is basic executive competence. A US response to a potential pandemic brewing in China should have been a top White House priority since early January. When there are coordination problems, it's the responsibility of the person at the top to sort it out. They didn't even try and fail to fix the problem, they identified an entirely different concern: the threat to the…

The Trump administration has responded quite slowly compared to the Obama administration's response to H1N1. The CDC commenced emergency operations a week after the first H1N1 case was detected, and advised school closings less than a week after that [0]. It seems likely that Trump's unfavorable comparison of the Obama H1N1 response to his COVID-19 response will come back to haunt him [1]. We'd be extremely lucky to…

I'm curious about why this is being downvoted.

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

#229

Post by jMyles »

mercutio2 wrote: post #198
jMyles wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the degree that the WHO was wildly irresponsible - and I'm not I'm ready to apply the "wildly" part, it was publishing the terrifying 3.4% CFR when there was no basis for caluculating a denominator at that time. Even though they've been called out on that by one of the world's foremost experts in the area of research reliability [0], and even though every subsequent study [1] [2] [3] [4] has shown the CFR to be fa…

People keep repeating this idea that there's no basis for guessing the denominator of the CFR. This is silly. The denominator of CFR is the number of people positively identified as having the disease. This isn't something that needs guessing. The problem is that the general population doesn't understand that you can't project from a CFR at one instant in time to the actual fatality rate in the population. But there'…

You are responding to arguments that nobody (at least that I've seen) are making.

This has nothing to do with terms of art. The WHO used the CFR at a moment when every expert was pointing out that the vast majority of cases were unknown and unreported. If the WHO wanted to publish a specific report, outlining their methodology, and including the (not very useful) CFR, that'd have been fine, and in keeping with what we might expect from the practices of a world-class public health organization.

But they didn't. They held a press conference, intended for the general public, during which the director read a prepared statement that said, "Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected," with no further clarification of what those numbers mean or what it means to compare them in this fashion.

> The problem is that the general population doesn't understand that you can't project from a CFR at one instant in time to the actual fatality rate in the population.

I don't think this is the problem. I think that the problem is that the WHO chose to use this number without explaining it, and used it in a comparison that makes no sense.

> But there's no need to criticize epidemiological terms of art just because people don't understand them and/or misuse them.

Just to be clear: you are criticizing John Ioannidis for his lack of understanding of the terms of art of epidemiology because he thinks that the WHO press conference was misleading? Do I have that right? How exactly do you suggest he frame his argument so as not to run afoul of this rule?

Do you make the same argument of all of the experts around the world pointing to "the denominator problem"?

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

#230

Post by H8crilA »

threatofrain wrote: post #226
Natsu wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's effectively the complete opposite of how to actually eliminate errors. The way engineers do it involves depersonalizing it to get away from blame games, assessing all contributing causes, doing proper risk modeling and working to improve the systems so that they rely on human frailty as little as possible. Skin in the game is an easy concept we're all familiar with, but it generally leads to adverse behavior l…

Engineers create systems where individual vigilance is less disastrous, or where vigilance is augmented. The real world and tech world still does rely on brute-force responsibility sometimes, to cover the gaps in a plan where the details were left out.

Exactly, the complexity of the "real world" far exceeds that of what a typical engineer deals with. This requires more darwinian, rather than cerebral, processes, simply because human brains are too small to understand all consequences.
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