It’s not that screening is ineffective, it’s that the initial kits sent out by the CDC were defective. That isn’t true everywhere (places where patients have be

It’s not that screening is ineffective, it’s that the initial kits sent out by the CDC were defective. That isn’t true everywhere (places where patients have been evacuated to have testing capabilities, like California, Chicago, and Omaha), and samples can still be tested at the CDC, it just leads to a delay. It’s not ideal but it isn’t like testing simply isn’t working. As for the man in Denver, it would be very unlikely to be COVID. There is some evidence starting to emerge currently of transmission now occurring in the US, but it’s still very early and concentrated to where you might expect. It takes a while for coronavirus to kill (about 7-14 days after symptoms appear), and so if this dude was sick with it, he would almost certainly have to have had either traveled out of the country (to China), or been close with someone who had. That is something any competent medical staff will ask, and if it were the case, they could send samples to be tested to the CDC. It may be possible moving forward that if community transmission starts spreading here in the US, things could start slipping through the cracks, but at this point it’s highly unlikely that anyone in Colorado who died a week ago was sick with COVID