9 ms·

Thousands of coronavirus tests are going unused in US labs

66 points by bgutierrez 6y ago

kingkawn 6y ago
I live in nyc and have a brother who lives in Vietnam. When a person in my brother’s building tested positive for the coronavirus the government quarantined the building, tested every single person who lives and works there, stationed police outside to enforce the lockdown, and delivered food for two weeks. If someone had tested positive they would be relocated to a hospital facility for treatment. When the tests for everyone else in the building came back negative the government let them all resume the normal social distancing rules and going to the grocery store again. Contrast this with nyc where the virus is outta control, few tests are being done outside the hospital system, and there is no sense of a comprehensive presence of government effort other than the police harassing people who quarantine together when they take walks in public. America is finished if this is the best we got.
- mc32 6y ago
  I agree with the testing regime; I don’t agree with having police in every building. That's at least three people per day watching over the comings and goings of a building. You can only do that when you have a near police-state.
  - thomk 6y ago
    Why? Who else would enforce the quarantine?
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      Police outside the buildings.
  - kingkawn 6y ago
    As of this moment America has a little less than 17,000 dead from this. We could’ve used more competence and seriousness about this threat for the sake of everyone, not petty indulgences of performative outrage about a concept of freedom that feels hollow as we all are forced to hide.
    - whb07 6y ago
      And in that time span about the same people died from the "regular" flu. Speak for yourself, the "concept of freedom" that you talk about is one of the many reasons the U.S is what it is. The freedoms we have do have costs at times like these but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        “It only killed as many as the flu” is a weird talking point. It killed that many with an unprecedented shutdown of the entire global economy to mitigate it.
        scottlocklin 6y ago
        Do you think the flu doesn't respond to the measures taken against corona-chan?
        ceejayoz 6y ago
        The point: Comparing annual flu deaths when we don't shut down the whole world to COVID-19 deaths when we do (especially to make the claim they're similarly dangerous) is insane. If 100 people drown in lakes, that's not really odd. If 100 people drown in the middle of the Sahara a thousand miles from the nearest water, that's weird.
        scottlocklin 6y ago
        Looked to me like he was comparing flu deaths now to corona deaths now. If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same, we've probably made a terrible mistake. Maybe looking at total pneumonia deaths for anomalies is the right thing to do?
        ceejayoz 6y ago
        > If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same, we've probably made a terrible mistake. No, probably not. The seasonal flu infects a billion people a year, and still doesn't do things like collapse Italy's healthcare system.
- rmetzler 6y ago
  Quarantine and testing is the way to fight the virus and be able to return to the normal as soon as possible. Western countries fear it’s not possible to do this and regulate the people much more than they usually do. But the problem is, without quarantine the virus is going to spread and shutting down the economy like they did now will have much bigger consequences over the long run. Too many people live from paycheck to paycheck.
  - kingkawn 6y ago
    We’ll learn one way or another
  - notyourday 6y ago
    > Quarantine and testing is the way to fight the virus and be able to return to the normal as soon as possible. What you are describing is a way to handle flare ups and it only works in police states. At the current time the only way to fight viruses is with vaccines. It is extremely unfortunate that even during this pandemic our experts keep avoiding repeating this.
    - lbeltrame 6y ago
      Vaccines might not work. There are four at this point being studied in humans (everything else is preclinical), with three of them just in phase 1, that means testing safety, and not yet efficacy. We don't yet know whether they will work, or if the immunity will last long enough. We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs.
      - notyourday 6y ago
        > Vaccines might not work. That's not the point I am making. The only solution to virus spreading is immunity. It can either come from a vaccine or it can come from infections themselves. This virus falls within a virus category. Should the population not be immune to the virus, the flare ups will occur. > We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs That's managing flare ups. Look at measles in non-vaccinated pockets of NYS: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us-measles-cases-hit-1234-brooklyn-outbreak-called-over https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us-measl... The immunity rate (mostly via vaccination) for measles in the US is over 91%. The immunity rate for COVID-19 in the US would be a percentage of people who were infected since there's no vaccine.
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  > America is finished if this is the best we got. Thank goodness NYC isn't America, or even the best America's got.
  - justin66 6y ago
    The cities that can lay claim to being the greatest city in the world without getting laughed out of the room can - unless I'm missing a few - be counted on one hand. I wonder what other cities in the United States you believe qualify.
    - umanwizard 6y ago
      I dunno, I liked living in Tucson, AZ better than New York. Yes NYC has a unique grandeur but different people like different things; it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale. (That said, I don’t endorse GP’s flippant dismissal of NYC either.)
      - justin66 6y ago
        > it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale I think very old, classic measures like economic activity, the number of great works of art that come out of a place, the influence of a city on its surrounding region and its world, and the progress toward better public health and safety measures (highly relevant here) are a lot more quantifiable than one might at first believe.
        umanwizard 6y ago
        Yeah, NYC is better than Tucson on all those metrics. Tucson is better on metrics like "I subjectively think the landscape looks nice", and "I like the sort of people who live there". What's your point?
        justin66 6y ago
        I was engaging with the grandparent post about "the best America's got," which is an interesting topic generally, but also specifically in terms of public health. And then I corrected your statement it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale by naming a number of very reasonable - and I think, important rather than silly - objective scales by which a city can be measured. I mean, if you don't think a city's economic output is an important objective measure, congratulations on never having lived in an area with a serious economic contraction (or read about one, apparently). If you don't think a city's rate of cholera cases (to use a classic example) or, more to the point, COVID 19 cases, is important, I don't even... (I wouldn't want to live in NYC either, but I think that's uninteresting and not what any of this is about.)
- agumonkey 6y ago
  In France it's slightly better but not smart in any sense. It's as if the heavy infrastructure and "modern" tech blinded the common sense..
- pharrington 6y ago
  "America is finished if this is the best we got" I am 100% sure the Donald Trump administration's nation-scale coordination is not the best we've got. For example, see the CDC's Ebola response in 2014 https://www.cdc.gov/about/ebola/timeline.html https://www.cdc.gov/about/ebola/timeline.html .
johnchristopher 6y ago
Take that with a pinch of salt, things aren't clear yet, but: Well, I read today we have a problem like that in Belgium: it seems small bio labs aren't allowed to test even though they adapted their equipment and workflow. Only big pharma are lined up.
mnm1 6y ago
Not having advanced medical equipment or doctors is one way to have a health system that doesn't work. Not hiring a programmer to write you a script to connect two systems during the worst unemployment event in almost a hundred years is another one. As are so many of the other reasons here. We are finding out that our healthcare system really isn't up to par not only because we don't have equipment, but because due to lack of regulations that benefit profit seeking, the system barely works. If only we had some sort of over arching entity that could force all these disparate systems to work together based on a set of rules ... you know, a government and specifically a government that works not one that's constantly being dismantled by idiots who think the corona virus is a hoax. In the end, the crisis always boils down to not having an effective, functioning government and leadership. This would be unacceptable in many places, but the US has extremely low standards in general so it's business as usual.

66 points by bgutierrez 6y ago

I live in nyc and have a brother who lives in Vietnam. When a person in my brother’s building tested positive for the coronavirus the government quarantined the building, tested every single person who lives and works there, stationed police outside to enforce the lockdown, and delivered food for two weeks. If someone had tested positive they would be relocated to a hospital facility for treatment. When the tests for everyone else in the building came back negative the government let them all resume the normal social distancing rules and going to the grocery store again. Contrast this with nyc where the virus is outta control, few tests are being done outside the hospital system, and there is no sense of a comprehensive presence of government effort other than the police harassing people who quarantine together when they take walks in public. America is finished if this is the best we got.

mc32 6y ago
I agree with the testing regime; I don’t agree with having police in every building. That's at least three people per day watching over the comings and goings of a building. You can only do that when you have a near police-state.
- thomk 6y ago
  Why? Who else would enforce the quarantine?
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    Police outside the buildings.
- kingkawn 6y ago
  As of this moment America has a little less than 17,000 dead from this. We could’ve used more competence and seriousness about this threat for the sake of everyone, not petty indulgences of performative outrage about a concept of freedom that feels hollow as we all are forced to hide.
  - whb07 6y ago
    And in that time span about the same people died from the "regular" flu. Speak for yourself, the "concept of freedom" that you talk about is one of the many reasons the U.S is what it is. The freedoms we have do have costs at times like these but the benefits vastly outweigh the costs.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      “It only killed as many as the flu” is a weird talking point. It killed that many with an unprecedented shutdown of the entire global economy to mitigate it.
      - scottlocklin 6y ago
        Do you think the flu doesn't respond to the measures taken against corona-chan?
        ceejayoz 6y ago
        The point: Comparing annual flu deaths when we don't shut down the whole world to COVID-19 deaths when we do (especially to make the claim they're similarly dangerous) is insane. If 100 people drown in lakes, that's not really odd. If 100 people drown in the middle of the Sahara a thousand miles from the nearest water, that's weird.
        scottlocklin 6y ago
        Looked to me like he was comparing flu deaths now to corona deaths now. If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same, we've probably made a terrible mistake. Maybe looking at total pneumonia deaths for anomalies is the right thing to do?
        ceejayoz 6y ago
        > If indeed those numbers are comparable or the same, we've probably made a terrible mistake. No, probably not. The seasonal flu infects a billion people a year, and still doesn't do things like collapse Italy's healthcare system.
rmetzler 6y ago
Quarantine and testing is the way to fight the virus and be able to return to the normal as soon as possible. Western countries fear it’s not possible to do this and regulate the people much more than they usually do. But the problem is, without quarantine the virus is going to spread and shutting down the economy like they did now will have much bigger consequences over the long run. Too many people live from paycheck to paycheck.
- kingkawn 6y ago
  We’ll learn one way or another
- notyourday 6y ago
  > Quarantine and testing is the way to fight the virus and be able to return to the normal as soon as possible. What you are describing is a way to handle flare ups and it only works in police states. At the current time the only way to fight viruses is with vaccines. It is extremely unfortunate that even during this pandemic our experts keep avoiding repeating this.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    Vaccines might not work. There are four at this point being studied in humans (everything else is preclinical), with three of them just in phase 1, that means testing safety, and not yet efficacy. We don't yet know whether they will work, or if the immunity will last long enough. We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs.
    - notyourday 6y ago
      > Vaccines might not work. That's not the point I am making. The only solution to virus spreading is immunity. It can either come from a vaccine or it can come from infections themselves. This virus falls within a virus category. Should the population not be immune to the virus, the flare ups will occur. > We need drugs before vaccines, to be able to treat the disease and/or its sympthoms and hopefully make sure patients don't end up in ICUs That's managing flare ups. Look at measles in non-vaccinated pockets of NYS: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us-measles-cases-hit-1234-brooklyn-outbreak-called-over https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2019/09/us-measl... The immunity rate (mostly via vaccination) for measles in the US is over 91%. The immunity rate for COVID-19 in the US would be a percentage of people who were infected since there's no vaccine.
stronglikedan 6y ago
> America is finished if this is the best we got. Thank goodness NYC isn't America, or even the best America's got.
- justin66 6y ago
  The cities that can lay claim to being the greatest city in the world without getting laughed out of the room can - unless I'm missing a few - be counted on one hand. I wonder what other cities in the United States you believe qualify.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    I dunno, I liked living in Tucson, AZ better than New York. Yes NYC has a unique grandeur but different people like different things; it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale. (That said, I don’t endorse GP’s flippant dismissal of NYC either.)
    - justin66 6y ago
      > it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale I think very old, classic measures like economic activity, the number of great works of art that come out of a place, the influence of a city on its surrounding region and its world, and the progress toward better public health and safety measures (highly relevant here) are a lot more quantifiable than one might at first believe.
      - umanwizard 6y ago
        Yeah, NYC is better than Tucson on all those metrics. Tucson is better on metrics like "I subjectively think the landscape looks nice", and "I like the sort of people who live there". What's your point?
        justin66 6y ago
        I was engaging with the grandparent post about "the best America's got," which is an interesting topic generally, but also specifically in terms of public health. And then I corrected your statement it’s silly to think one city is better than another on some objective scale by naming a number of very reasonable - and I think, important rather than silly - objective scales by which a city can be measured. I mean, if you don't think a city's economic output is an important objective measure, congratulations on never having lived in an area with a serious economic contraction (or read about one, apparently). If you don't think a city's rate of cholera cases (to use a classic example) or, more to the point, COVID 19 cases, is important, I don't even... (I wouldn't want to live in NYC either, but I think that's uninteresting and not what any of this is about.)
agumonkey 6y ago
In France it's slightly better but not smart in any sense. It's as if the heavy infrastructure and "modern" tech blinded the common sense..
pharrington 6y ago
"America is finished if this is the best we got" I am 100% sure the Donald Trump administration's nation-scale coordination is not the best we've got. For example, see the CDC's Ebola response in 2014 https://www.cdc.gov/about/ebola/timeline.html https://www.cdc.gov/about/ebola/timeline.html .

johnchristopher 6y ago

Take that with a pinch of salt, things aren't clear yet, but: Well, I read today we have a problem like that in Belgium: it seems small bio labs aren't allowed to test even though they adapted their equipment and workflow. Only big pharma are lined up.

mnm1 6y ago

Not having advanced medical equipment or doctors is one way to have a health system that doesn't work. Not hiring a programmer to write you a script to connect two systems during the worst unemployment event in almost a hundred years is another one. As are so many of the other reasons here. We are finding out that our healthcare system really isn't up to par not only because we don't have equipment, but because due to lack of regulations that benefit profit seeking, the system barely works. If only we had some sort of over arching entity that could force all these disparate systems to work together based on a set of rules ... you know, a government and specifically a government that works not one that's constantly being dismantled by idiots who think the corona virus is a hoax. In the end, the crisis always boils down to not having an effective, functioning government and leadership. This would be unacceptable in many places, but the US has extremely low standards in general so it's business as usual.