Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

khn.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 339 posts

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

#251

Post by Reedx »

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…

People want a simple, tidy villain and hero story. As though everything would suddenly be solved if only their hero of choice vanquished the villain. Unfortunately, as you point out, the real problem is institutional decay.

A recent article summed this up pretty well:

"Such a mobilization failure is never an individual's fault. Rather, it reveals a hollow state. In the alphabet soup of federal agencies, there is no one with the information and authority to act on the consequences of an exponential curve...

In the middle of the 20th century, a cadre of credentialed experts was created to replace citizens. This was a mistake. The selection mechanism for entry into this cadre selects against bravery and original thinking. Experts should be consulted, but what use is an expert unwilling to consult on a grand vision? The American system of the 2020s through the city, county, state, and up to the federal level has been staffed with people who know how to speak and make themselves appear blameless, but not how to act."

https://americanmind.org/features/the-coronacrisis-and-our-f...

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

#252

Post by specialist »

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…

"The CDC and FDA were in territorial pissing matches with one another around test regulation."

This is normal. In every org at every level.

It's leadership's job to knock heads, to span boundaries and turf and inertia, to make everyone play nicely together.

"Buck stops here" and all that.

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

#253

Post by jMyles »

mercutio2 wrote: post #249
jMyles wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

Sure, there's a sizable denominator problem. That people misunderstand what CFR is is a problem, too. If we want to know how lethal the virus is, we need sampling of who actually has contracted it, which is tough in the early stages of a pandemic.

> If we want to know how lethal the virus is, we need sampling of who actually has contracted it, which is tough in the early stages of a pandemic.

But several studies have done the best job possible, given different pieces of the dataset, to arrive at a more accurate IFR (see the links in the above content).

I haven't seen anybody, in any published paper, defend the 3.4% as a likely indicator of the actual fatality rate.

So why are we still crafting policy as if this virus is between 10 and 100 times more deadly than it actually appears to be, according to the best data available today?

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

#254

Post by someguydave »

greedo wrote: post #245
robomartin wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Rem…

Most of my life I've been told that government is horrible, and that the most terrifying thing to hear is "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." When an entire generation hears the demonization of civil service (though not military service), then it's no wonder that we end up with a government that can't serve us.

Why isn’t there any political will to completely overhaul civil service hiring, pay, qualifications, “tenure”, and so forth?

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

#255

Post by someguydave »

belltaco wrote: post #179
asquabventured wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this mentality when other Western Nations are going through the exact same thing. Did the administration cause every other countries problems with containing the virus too?

Whatever happened to American exceptionalism? >Did the administration cause every other countries problems with containing the virus too The American people did not elect and pay other countries to take care of them, they did for their government. The administration dismantled the pandemic team from the highest levels and along with their media cronies, actively minimized it for several weeks[1][2] and made it politi…

When you use the word “administration” are you thinking about a few hundred elected and directly appointed officials or the hundreds of thousands of government employees? Because it seems like the employees bungled the job.

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

#257

Post by someguydave »

Gatsky wrote: post #119

The problem is a global lack of preparation for a pandemic of this nature, despite multiple warning shots in the last couple of decades. The problem is incompetent, complacent government, and the political processes which enable it, and lately, even reward it. Blaming the CDC seems pointless. There are any number of institutions which could have done better. The thing is you don't want to be relying on everything goi…

The trouble with the concept of something like the CDC is that it needs to remain very sharp and poised for events that only happen once every few decades. That means that there is plenty of time between major events for the employees to lose focus on the primary mission.

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

#258

Post by sudosysgen »

someguydave wrote: post #254
greedo wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of my life I've been told that government is horrible, and that the most terrifying thing to hear is "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help." When an entire generation hears the demonization of civil service (though not military service), then it's no wonder that we end up with a government that can't serve us.

Why isn’t there any political will to completely overhaul civil service hiring, pay, qualifications, “tenure”, and so forth?

This will likely get downvoted, but it seems to be the most accurate explanation.

American culture is not able to understand the common good anymore. And it cannot understand the brutality of politics, nor the need to participate in it. This is the age of children of cages, forgotten in a week for the official opposition to complain about civility on Twitter. Meanwhile other Western countries burn tires and flip over cars for a thousand times less. In non Western countries, people stand up to bullets in order to complain about the government. But this country made mean people on Twitter the main issue in the election cycle, above Healthcare, War and Concentration camps.

The American public has grown soft, largely by design.

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

#259

Post by x0x0 »

robomartin wrote: post #222
JDulin wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Rem…

The role of the federal government is to be our insurer and to eat risk. Unlike state governments, there is no balanced budget requirement. Blaming Cuomo -- ie all 50 individual states, with not only currently varying populations, but populations and incomes and risks that vary over time -- for not independently staffing up and buying equipment to be prepared against all eventualities is silly.

Second, Trump diddled for 8-12 weeks to start manufacturing things. People are screaming because the Chinese government confirmed by Dec 31 that they had cases of the virus. That means the NSA had almost certainly been hearing about it for a couple weeks. Given the worlds' experience with SARS and MERS, that was the time to get serious.

What was possible with this warning? Taiwan, for example, used this time to create 32 new production lines [1] for masks.

Later, there were classified briefings that Republicans like Senator Burr were privately warning businesses about. While lying to the public and using the warning period not to get serious about dealing with the pandemic but to save money.

We had 8-12 weeks of warning, and Trump either took no serious action or deliberately delayed decisive action to start figuring out supply lines of respirators or ventilators. We had, to use your phrase, "MONTHS" -- actually a quarter of a year -- and Trump squandered them.

He invoked the Defense Production Act YESTERDAY for god's sake. The time to do that was when it became clear containment had failed. Ie sometime around mid-January.

ps -- we make plenty of stuff in the US. in reality, the US is the second largest manufacturer in the world after China. That's not to say that manufacturing isn't declining in the united states, but to pretend the enormous set of US manufacturers doesn't exist is not grounded in facts.

See also BLS 51-4111 -- 72k employed in the US in tool & die manufacturing.

[1] https://focustaiwan.tw/society/202003230016

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

#260

Post by mindslight »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #68
lisper wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The larger question is why the heck didn't the administration seeing what was going, on step in, and say this is an emergency situation, allow private testing! At the risk of getting overly political for HN, it seems to me that the answer to that should be pretty obvious to anyone who has been paying any attention over the last three years: this administration has an active disdain for expertise of any kind. The on…

> The only remaining question is whether the current situation will cause any of Trump's supporters to question the wisdom of valuing loyalty above all else (and particularly above competence). If not, then this is just the beginning of our pain. Trump supporters aren't great at critical thinking - that's why we're in this mess. I'm pretty sure a large majority of them will buy the con that it was the previous admini…

Don't forget there was a large contingent of Republicans that reluctantly voted for Trump simply because he was the Republican. They wouldn't have minded Trump's obstinance when the only victim was the other team, but his failing to address reality in the face of a shared crisis is a completely different beast. If they're not already aghast at the complete lack of leadership they hear and see every day, a death toll of hundreds of thousands will certainly make them consider competing narratives.
Post reply on HN