3 ms·

I've seen comparisons like that doing the rounds. They're just plain wrong. The 500 number is the number of patients that had been tested by the CDC about a wee

by makomk 7y ago

I've seen comparisons like that doing the rounds. They're just plain wrong. The 500 number is the number of patients that had been tested by the CDC about a week ago, excluding state and local labs, whereas the 100 confirmed cases is a newer figure and a lot of those cases were diagnosed by the very state and local lab tests that aren't being counted. From looking at an old version of the CDC web page, at the point when diagnosed cases hit 100 the CDC alone had tested about 1,500 patients. At one point the CDC pulled the number of tests from their web page to try and stop people making this error, but everyone just started comparing the old and increasingly outdated number from before they did this to the number of confirmed cases in the latest news headlines. The stuff blaming it on Trump firing the part of the CDC that deals with pandemics is untrue too. (Though sadly, the testing might have rolled out more smoothly if he had culled the CDC a bit... their in-house facilities seem to have really screwed things up.)

davidw 7y ago
The CDC stopped posting the numbers of tests they'd run a few days back. I don't know if they started again. It's not confidence inspiring. I don't know if this has anything at all to do with firing the pandemic team, but you have to figure that didn't help, either. Any administration has a lot of competent career professionals working for them. Events like this are the time to let them do their thing without hindrance, and without random commentary from uninformed leaders.
craftinator 7y ago
If I fired my team of system security engineers, then a data breach was discovered, and great harm came to my company because there was no one there familiar enough with the system to know what to do, you'd probably think it was my fault. Ya know, because I did piss poor risk management. And did not conduct due diligence with risk analysis. Especially if my company had more than enough funding to have them there... Because data breaches don't happen often, but they are BAD NEWS when they do; there's a good reason that job exists.

by makomk 7y ago

davidw 7y ago

The CDC stopped posting the numbers of tests they'd run a few days back. I don't know if they started again. It's not confidence inspiring. I don't know if this has anything at all to do with firing the pandemic team, but you have to figure that didn't help, either. Any administration has a lot of competent career professionals working for them. Events like this are the time to let them do their thing without hindrance, and without random commentary from uninformed leaders.

craftinator 7y ago

If I fired my team of system security engineers, then a data breach was discovered, and great harm came to my company because there was no one there familiar enough with the system to know what to do, you'd probably think it was my fault. Ya know, because I did piss poor risk management. And did not conduct due diligence with risk analysis. Especially if my company had more than enough funding to have them there... Because data breaches don't happen often, but they are BAD NEWS when they do; there's a good reason that job exists.