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Absolutely. Was talking with a friend who was confused about why schools in remote areas are being shut down - testing needs to be done just so people realize t
by MiroF 7y ago
Absolutely. Was talking with a friend who was confused about why schools in remote areas are being shut down - testing needs to be done just so people realize that it's not just Washington or New York, this is pretty much everywhere or imminently about to be everywhere in the United States.
- chrisco255 7y agoAnyone want guess at how difficult it is to ramp up testing to a population of 320 million for a disease that didn't exist 4 months ago?
- ajross 7y agoVery difficult, which is why work should have started, ahem, four months ago. Now we are, indeed, hopelessly behind.
- chrisco255 7y agoThey did start working on it 4 months ago. The CDC has been on the case since then. Mind you, China was not cooperating with us and wouldn't allow our experts into the country while it was getting bad there. They are ramping up rapidly and we'll see that over the next few days.
- ajross 7y agoI'm sorry, that's just... completely wrong. Everything you said is wrong. People in the media and elsewhere have been clamoring for months for details from the CDC about how they'll be rolling out testing, and it never arrived. It still hasn't arrived. We're still in the low dozens of tests per day. You're telling me that it's somehow physically impossible for the CDC to have ramped testing beyond that when other nations are in the thousands or tens of thousands per day? And as far as China not cooperating: they published the full sequence of this thing back in January. We had the genes for this thing even before we had a name for it, or for the disease. And that's not enough help for the CDC? Where are you getting this information from? Please tell me it's not partisan media.
- stevenwoo 7y agoThe best response was from a somewhere China thinks should not exist - the Taiwanese government. They started working on this when China finally let the rest of the world know. There is a lot of people traffic between those two countries so one might have expected Taiwan to have been hit hard, but the Taiwan health authorities were aggressive in being preventative. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762689
- matchbok 7y agoThis is simply incorrect.
- stevenwoo 7y agoItaly and South Korea managed to scale up widespread testing and their economies are proportionately much smaller than the USA for their population.
- rstupek 7y agoItaly is geographically half the size of Texas and South Korea is 1/7 the size of Texas. It's considerably easier to do widespread testing when everyone practically lives next to everyone else.
- bluGill 7y agoThe chemicals needed to do a test are in short supply. I would assume Italy and South Korea used a lot of the supply, meaning less for anyone else. Italy of course clearly needed all they used (and more), while Korea could be argued used to much. Note that latter is a no-win situation - nobody knows exactly how much testing is needed, either you test what is probably too much or you don't test enough. Or you can not test, and treat everybody as infected. For hospitals and high risks people you should be doing that anyway.
- Jtsummers 7y agoIt's not just one group that's doing it, though. This sort of testing (as addressed in other comments) can be done through university and hospital labs throughout the country, along with state and local health agencies and various private testing firms (mostly consolidated at this point). Instead of going it alone, the focus could've (perhaps should've) been on early collaboration with those partners on establishing consistent testing procedures (whether they used precisely the same measures, validation that they were getting the same results) and a process to distribute the workload. This wasn't done, that's the reason the scaling failed.
- Lewton 7y agoThe ability to test for this scales linearly with number of people...
- bluGill 7y agoNot when you run out of raw materials to make the tests. I could leave my job and create them, but that would take months to train me (and maybe years if I have to create my own equipment - it takes time to become a certified welder as just one task that doesn't scale quickly)
- Lewton 7y ago.... The raw materials for doing these tests scale linearly with population too. It's just RNA sequencing, it can be done at any university using standard equipment and materials
- bluGill 7y agoRight, until we run out of labs, and/or the labs run out of materials.
- Lewton 7y agoWhat does that have to do with the US's testing capability per capita compared to other countries?
- bluGill 7y agoWe cannot scale linearly per capita.
- ceejayoz 7y agoIf the US can't get enough lab materials to match one day of South Korea's test reagent usage, that should be its own huge scandal.