As the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reviews what went wrong, it has identified four crucial missteps: the initial decision to forego the testing offered by the World Health Organization (WHO), flaws with the original test developed by the CDC, overly restrictive federal government guidelines on who could be tested, and a significant lag time in enlisting private sector help to jumpstart testing capacity. But of all the flaws, the decision not to adopt the WHO testing in mid-January cost the U.S. precious time. By the time the CDC released its COVID-19 test on Jan. 28, the virus had already been circulating in the U.S. for a couple weeks. And by late February, experts say, "the opportunity to halt the relentless spread of the virus within the U.S. population had been lost," writes the AP.
All of those missteps were then supercharged by Trump's consistent early messaging downplaying the disastrous threat posed by the virus. “There were many, many opportunities not to end up where we are,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the director of the Global Health Institute at Harvard, told the AP. “Basically, they took this as business as usual. ... And that’s because the messaging from the White House was ‘this is not a big deal, this is no worse than the flu.’ So that message basically created no sense of urgency within the FDA or the CDC to fix it.”
Let's just pause right there and reflect on how broken the federal government must be right now if the CDC was lulled into complacency about an emerging pandemic by a bozo like Trump. Sure, he's head of state, but he's also a complete idiot by any reasonable standard. Any serious scientist monitoring the stats flowing out of China and other areas of the world clearly understood the emerging threat as January wore on.
To this day, experts say the nation isn't testing nearly enough people fast enough to get a reasonable picture of the scope of the crisis. In fact, beyond the basic problem of testing capacity, getting test results back still takes a week in many cases.
Nowhere are those insufficiencies more pronounced than in New York City, where case rates have soared even as testing has mostly been restricted to healthcare workers and the most critically ill patients. New York could be a second chance for the nation to get a handle on exactly how deadly this disease is, the rate at which it infects people, how it's spread and how it can be contained.
"We are the future of the rest of the country," New York University epidemiologist Dr. Elodie Ghedin told MSNBC Wednesday. The problem, she said, is that we continue to have "ascertainment bias," meaning we're only testing certain patients while ignoring the rest of the general population. "So we have no sense of what is really circulating," Ghedin explained. "We don't know the attack rate or presence among the rest of the population." And therefore, it's also nearly impossible to tell what's most effective in slowing the progression of the disease.
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