Exclusive: The Strongest Evidence Yet That America Is Botching Coronavirus Testing

[UpInArms]

It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?

This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.

“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”

Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.

... snip ...

The figures we gathered suggest that the American response to the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has been shockingly sluggish, especially compared with that of other developed countries. The CDC confirmed eight days ago that the virus was in community transmission in the United States—that it was infecting Americans who had neither traveled abroad nor were in contact with others who had. In South Korea, more than 66,650 people were tested within a week of its first case of community transmission, and it quickly became able to test 10,000 people a day. The United Kingdom, which has only 115 positive cases, has so far tested 18,083 people for the virus.

More at https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/03/how-many-americans-have-been-tested-coronavirus/607597/

[bullwinkle428]

1. "I don't know what went wrong this time." - I'll give you 3 guesses, and the first two don't count!

[Baitball Blogger]

4. +1

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. "I don't know what went wrong this time." I do.

Trump doesn't want us to know how many people are getting sick.

[Turbineguy]

3. Make-believe

is the architrave of the trump prezidency.

[central scrutinizer]

5. What we don't know

Can’t hurt Trump

[SunSeeker]

6. Intentional negligence to keep the numbers low?

Reminds me of when they kept saying only 16 Puerto Ricans died from Hurricane Maria, and it turned out it was many thousands.

[JHB]

7. Q: "I don't know what went wrong this time." A: Republicans. Conservatives.

It's not just Trump. It's the people who built the road he's drag-racing on and who have backed him at every turn. Sure, there have been some ineffectual grumblings and deliberately inadequate performance-theater votes against him, but nobody sticks their neck out to rally the "moderate" Republicans and "principled" conservatives against him.

And he's just implementing their "small enough to drown in a bathtub" agenda anyway.

There's no mystery. They wanted shrunken, ineffective government, and they have one. They put it in place and keep it there. This is what they have wrought.

[Yonnie3]

8. CDC now says they have done 1,583 tests

A foot note at https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-in-us.html says

"As of March 5, 2020 1,583 patients had been tested at CDC. This does not include testing being done at state and local public health laboratories, which began this week."

IIRC that is more than triple the number they gave early in the week.