> why isn't capitalism solving them? Because there's no money in it. We're likely going to have a surge of cases over January (judging by what happened in Sout

> why isn't capitalism solving them? Because there's no money in it. We're likely going to have a surge of cases over January (judging by what happened in South Africa). If I'm a test maker/provider, I'm not going to spend a week ramping up production, have the extra tests arrive in two weeks, just do be on the downside of the surge. It's the same reason I didn't build up more capacity in October. There's a vaccine and boosters are starting. Why would I take a gamble on a new variant? One role of government is to step in when markets fail. We saw test shortages a year ago, and a new variant was an eventual likelihood. The government needed to place the test orders so that the risk didn't get shifted to markets uninterested in that risk. This is almost entirely a failure of government leadership. To its credit, the US government did a really good job ordering vaccines. It's just handled testing very poorly.