
The United States badly bungled coronavirus testing, but things may soon improve - thesausageking
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/united-states-badly-bungled-coronavirus-testing-things-may-soon-improve
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divbzero
The CDC has a strong reputation and this would be a rare disappointment.

I think they still deserve benefit of the doubt for now but also owe the
public a clear explanation, especially when professional epidemiologists are
also puzzled by the situation.

The misstep if true would be particularly regretful for a couple reasons.
First, the underlying technology isn’t complicated: PCR [1] is for molecular
biology what the hash map might be for software engineering, not simple _per
se_ but well understood and widely used. The coronavirus test requires a
variation to detect RNA instead of DNA [2] but that still isn’t rocket
science. Second, the article points to alternative tests [3] that could
probably have been performed safely by many labs in the US if they had the
approval.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcription_polymera...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcription_polymerase_chain_reaction)

[3]: [https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-
coronavirus-2...](https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-
coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/laboratory-guidance)

( _Edit: It should be noted that PCR can be finicky. But given that labs
around the world have been sharing which primers they use, I would hope that
the CDC had access to that information, could test those primers in parallel,
and pick the ones that performed the best._ )

~~~
koheripbal
It's impossible to argue that there wasn't a misstep here. They test kits were
recalled, and they simultaneously banned states from developing their own
local tests - something multiple other countries were able to do with ease.

A PCR test is one of the simplest tests a lab can perform, and while there's
some value in centralizing tests - it's ridiculous to tie the hands of local
labs while simultaneously stalling the central test kits.

Whenever possible, in massive nation-wide problems like this, we need multiple
teams working in parallel. We cannot afford single points of failure like
this.

The same is true for vaccine development.

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3fe9a03ccd14ca5
> _China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up
> to 1.6 million tests a week_

China, for all of their faults, is showing what a omnipowerful central
government can do in an emergency. Forced quarantines (welding of apartment
doors closed), emergency food distribution, hospitals built in 7 days, and
instant ramp-up production of tests and drugs

~~~
warent
I'm not convinced it's effective considering people across the globe are still
being infected. This is just Chinese government dealing with problems in the
only way they know how: through inhumane brute force, flailing until the rest
of the world solves it for them.

~~~
scarmig
Cases outside China are, indeed, growing at an exponential rate.

Cases inside China are growing at a sublinear rate.

As far as I can tell, it's the rest of the world (sans a couple countries like
Singapore and Taiwan) that are flailing.

~~~
vanniv
Cases in China are growing at a sublinear rate according to the Chinese
government.

~~~
scarmig
China is loosening up quarantine regulations, bit by bit.

If their numbers are faked, then they're also being faked to internal decision
makers.

And, for what it's worth, the WHO confirms the numbers are broadly accurate.

