Excerpt from another informative article (Politico)
Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.
And this, from
an article in The Guardian:
By 13 January – three days after the gene sequence was published – a reliable test was available, developed by scientists at the department of virology at Berlin’s Charité university hospital with help from experts in Rotterdam, London and Hong Kong.
I would
love to see someone like Jane Mayer dig into questions like the following. I want to see the paper trail (emails, memos, meeting notes, guidelines...).
Why did the CDC decide they needed to produce their own test, rather than use the reliable test already developed? (An effort that apparently took an additional 3 weeks.) What process/reasoning, went into this disastrous decision?
Why didn't the FDA immediately trigger a regulatory workaround enabling qualified medical centers to roll out tests that they had designed themselves?
What failures in process allowed the CDC test "performance issues" to go undetected until AFTER they began distributing their test around Feb 5? (Problems identified by recipients, NOT the CDC.)
Why did most states have to continue to send their samples to CDC for an additional 4 weeks (through March 2), causing a "bottleneck"?
This calls for investigation. Whatever the findings, the one constant I think lies behind all the failures is the absence of a sense of urgency fueled by
Trump's lie, dismiss, downplay, deny, and ignore COVID-19 "strategy."
Time will tell how quickly we can put in place the means to collect samples from those who need to be tested,** and have those samples transported to, and processed by, labs with the capacity to produce rapid results. Test kits, by themselves, are of no use. There needs to be a system in place.
Time will also tell how high a price this nation will pay for the loss of those critical weeks.
_________
** "those who need to be tested" should include all contacts traced from known cases, as well as symptomatic people, particularly those who live, work, and otherwise have, or have had, contact with vulnerable people."
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