This was covered about a month ago in episode 595 of This Week in Virology[1], in answer to a listener question: Rich Condit: Garrett writes: The CDC guideline

This was covered about a month ago in episode 595 of This Week in Virology[1], in answer to a listener question: Rich Condit: Garrett writes: The CDC guidelines are to test hospitalized patients and symptomatic health care workers first, and the symptomatic general public last. This seems backwards to me. Alan Dove: Yeah. I just had this conversation with my wife after she had some, I mentioned this before, she had some coughing and shortness of breath, got immediately sent to the ER in the hospital where she works, and they did a chest x-ray, it was clear, and they said, "Ok, you don't meet criteria for testing. Go back to work." And she's been fine since then, and she, we were talking about it and she said, "Well, isn't that exactly who they should test, because then I could go and infect patients?" and I said, "Well, if they had enough tests, yes. But if you expand the testing to the people who are less sick, you don't have enough tests. Whereas if you restrict the testing to the people who are sickest, you do have enough tests." So it's a.. it's not the right way to do it, but it's the way that you actually can do it. Vincent Racaniello: Yeah, we're in this position because we don't have enough tests. We didn't ramp up... Dove: Because we don't have enough tests. We didn't prepare fast enough. Racaniello: If we had, we could test a lot of people and get an idea of how many actual infections there were, which would be very useful. But... we can't. So we're stuck with this current policy. [1]- http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-595/ http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-595/ about 1 hour and 19 minutes in to the program