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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

#41

Post by lisper »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #16
lmkg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the contention that if these early tests had worked, they actually would have been sufficient to protect the entire nation? The contention in the article is that there were multiple, compounding layers of fuck-ups.

> Meanwhile, the FDA did not allow anyone other than the CDC to test for coronavirus. true > there were multiple, compounding layers of fuck-ups. also true All of it is completely true. And the issue is that both of these were blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention to the situation. The CDC was struggling to develop the test, and the FDA regulates who can create tests under normal circumstances. The larger ques…

> 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 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.

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

#42

Post by mbreese »

jude- wrote: post #28
tosser0001 wrote: post #26

I just don't see what good is going to come out of worrying about this right now while the world is on fire. Everybody needs to be thinking about how to help in the coming weeks, anything else is a waste of time and mental energy. There will be plenty of time to analyze what went wrong with the initial response when things calm down. This is just raising the level of angst unnecessarily in my opinion.

If you want to come out of a lock-down without also causing the number of cases to spike again, we'll need to implement a widespread test-and-trace protocol similar to South Korea's. This requires _lots and lots_ of testing.

If you want to come out of lock-down, you really need a different test... you need a serological antibody test to tell if you've been exposed to the novel coronavirus (and thus have immunity from re-infection [0]). The current test can only tell you if you have an active infection. But before we can really open things up again, we'll need to know who is still at risk, and that requires the antibody test. There has been good progress in getting these tests to work, but it's not quite ready for prime-time.

And it will still be quite a while before we have a vaccine which is the ultimate goal.

[0] (assuming you can't be re-infected)

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

#43

Post by roenxi »

BoiledCabbage wrote: post #16
lmkg wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is the contention that if these early tests had worked, they actually would have been sufficient to protect the entire nation? The contention in the article is that there were multiple, compounding layers of fuck-ups.

> Meanwhile, the FDA did not allow anyone other than the CDC to test for coronavirus. true > there were multiple, compounding layers of fuck-ups. also true All of it is completely true. And the issue is that both of these were blatantly obvious to anyone paying attention to the situation. The CDC was struggling to develop the test, and the FDA regulates who can create tests under normal circumstances. The larger ques…

> Everyone saw the CDC couldn't scale up in time. Everyone knew the FDA regulation...

No way that is possibly true. People realised they didn't have tests. A bunch of people of a liberterian bent or systems thinkers would have picked the FDA as the problem very quickly. But for most people diagnosing and rectifying that sort of snarl in a complex bureaucratic process would have taken about as long as it did. This happened at blinding speed for a bureaucracy fixing up its own problems.

There were compounding failures that required a government body to put their hand up and say "I have too much power" or "lets take a risk on letting some non-government actors take key roles". It wasn't going to work unless the executive happened by amazing luck of have an infectious disease specialist in a key role (maybe president or VP) who was already sweating at night about asymptomatic infections.

The problem is the legislative framework where first response in a crisis was to centralise the response on a single point of failure. It barely matters who the actors were, superhuman effort by one or two people can't reliably overcome a bad system. This should never have been a situation where the CDC making a mistake delayed the crisis response by months and nobody but the CDC/FDA had the power to fix that.

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

#44

Post by acqq »

rstupek wrote: post #34
acqq wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no country has tested 1 million people Well, the country prepared for epidemics just didn't have to test one million people, but still kept it under control: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/how-south-korea-flattened... They were indeed able to use their tests more efficiently than any other country, and to really do a lot of tests compared to any other country: https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a304020000…

Wouldn't it also help that South Korea is 1/7th the size of Texas so it's a little easier to test everyone? It also helped one company mass produced tests

It's about priorities.

The US spends 15 times more money for military than South Korea but is still not able to comparably protect itself from a single epidemics. Instead, the U.S. citizens get what I've cited in another message here: "It will magically go away."

I wouldn't be so angry if that attitude haven't been contagious -- a lot of leaders of the U.S. NATO partners simply "followed the leader" and continued to sell similar story to their own countries.

Now the whole world is where it is.

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

#45

Post by wool_gather »

shaggyfrog wrote: post #32
tosser0001 wrote: post #26

I just don't see what good is going to come out of worrying about this right now while the world is on fire. Everybody needs to be thinking about how to help in the coming weeks, anything else is a waste of time and mental energy. There will be plenty of time to analyze what went wrong with the initial response when things calm down. This is just raising the level of angst unnecessarily in my opinion.

This comment is heavily biased towards a US-centric worldview. Different parts of the world are burning, or burning out, at different rates... so it’s not so much about “worrying about this right now” but “what lessons can one part of the globe learn from another that is a few days/weeks/months ahead”

The article is by a U.S. institute about a problem that only affects the U.S. There's nothing for the rest of the world to learn...they already did it right by using the WHO test.

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

#46

Post by grey-area »

nohat wrote: post #22
tunesmith wrote: post #2

This whole line of analysis has confused me. The CDC tests, while flawed, were never very numerous, right? Is the contention that if these early tests had worked, they actually would have been sufficient to protect the entire nation? It's seemed to me the problem has more been that we haven't stockpiled supplies over the past few years like South Korea did.

It's exponentially easier to respond to an outbreak the earlier you act, but our early response was hamstrung by the CDC and FDA (and complete apathy from the white house). We could have slowed or halted this in the early stages with better testing. At the least it would have confirmed how much community spread there already was and hopefully prodded the gov, states, and businesses into action sooner. Time matters. I…

This lacklustre response is still going on, the federal government simply isn’t taking this seriously.

Trump saying things will open up in just a few weeks and it’s important to restart the economy will cost thousands of lives by encouraging states not to lock down. Full lock down is now the only way out, and as it has spread, that will take months. Testing needs to massively ramp up too.

2000 people died in one day today globally from this, deaths have doubled in about five days and are growing exponentially.

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

#47

Post by h2odragon »

Where was the media in this? Lots of scare stories about potential pandemics back to January, in the US media, but I dont recall much if any "the CDC is fucking up / not testing" coverage.

Of course that kind of thing was probably being said in the froth of the fringe and conspiracy theorists, but thats all "fake news" and unmentionable now.

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

#48

Post by Animats »

From the New York Times:

"Peter Hotez, an eminent vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me that he and his colleagues have a candidate vaccine for the coronavirus but still haven’t been able to line up sufficient funding for clinical trials."[1]

This scientist was involved with developing a SARS vaccine. It never went to full clinical testing because the disease disappeared before the vaccine was ready. Hotez is also politically unpopular in some areas because he publicly takes on the anti-vaxers over measles vaccination.

VCs: now there's an opportunity.

[1] http://archive.is/skGAe#selection-1219.0-1219.231

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

#49

Post by ghostpepper »

PaulHoule wrote: post #8

When they tried testing in NYC they got sick people to stand in line with people who just think they might be sick, which causes the not sick people to be sick.

The smart countries are using drive-through testing.

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

#50

Post by malandrew »

tosser0001 wrote: post #26

I just don't see what good is going to come out of worrying about this right now while the world is on fire. Everybody needs to be thinking about how to help in the coming weeks, anything else is a waste of time and mental energy. There will be plenty of time to analyze what went wrong with the initial response when things calm down. This is just raising the level of angst unnecessarily in my opinion.

In any post mortem, it's dreadfully important to capture information while everything is fresh. People writing articles like this now are capturing valuable information that will inform any thorough post-mortem performed later.

The absolutely most useful post-mortems I've dealt with were ones where information wasn't gathered immediately. An outage that occurs on a Friday night is an example of one that will be low fidelity and less actionable. By Monday morning, everyone involved forgets many important details and the proper order of events necessary to get an accurate picture of what happened.

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