The Wall Street Journal reports that as the coronavirus pandemic began, America’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “provided restrictive guidance on who should be tested.”
They’re basing that on archived pages on the CDC’s own web site. “While agencies in other countries were advising and conducting widespread testing, the CDC, charged with setting the U.S. standard for who should be tested for the virus, kept its criteria limited.”
Once the CDC deferred testing evaluations to individual physicians and rolled out testing widely, early data show a surge in positive cases, so public-health officials expect a clearer picture of the epidemic’s scale to emerge… Containing a virus requires identifying and isolating those who are infected, infectious-disease and public-health experts say. “If we would have had a true understanding of the extent of the disease several weeks ago, implementation of social-distancing measures could have prevented the escalation of the disease,” said Neil Fishman, chief medical officer at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and an infectious-disease specialist…
Initially, the CDC recommended only investigating those who had symptoms and had recently traveled to Wuhan, China, or made contact with someone who may have the virus. As the outbreak worsened, it expanded the criteria for travel history slowly, but maintained its recommendation that symptoms be present, despite some cases having mild or no symptoms.
Now, the CDC has turned over authority to physicians to determine who gets tested, but the testing rates vary widely by state.
America’s response was also hampered by “a botched initial test batch,” according to the article, which meant there were fewer tests available until the agency allowed private laboratories to develop tests.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot