• Welcome to Tamil Brahmins forums.

    You are currently viewing our boards as a guest which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our Free Brahmin Community you will have access to post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), respond to polls, upload content and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free so please, join our community today!

    If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact contact us.

What Went Wrong with Coronavirus Testing in the U.S.

vembuv

Active member
What Went Wrong with Coronavirus Testing in the U.S.

1585309595301.png


On February 5th, sixteen days after a Seattle resident who had visited relatives in Wuhan, China, was diagnosed as having the first confirmed case of covid-19 in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, began sending diagnostic tests to a network of about a hundred state, city, and county public-health laboratories⁠. Up to that point, all testing for covid-19 in the U.S. had been done at the C.D.C.; of some five hundred suspected cases⁠ tested at the Centers, twelve had confirmed positive. The new test kits would allow about fifty thousand patients to be tested, and they would also make testing much faster, as patient specimens would no longer have to be sent to Atlanta to be evaluated.

The kits were shipped in small white cardboard boxes. Inside each box were four vials, packed in stiff gray foam⁠, which held the necessary materials, known as reagents, to run tests on about three hundred⁠ people. Before a state or local lab could use the C.D.C.-developed tests on actual patients, however, it had to insure that they worked the same way they had in Atlanta, a process known as verification. The first batch of kits, sent to more than fifty state and local public-health labs⁠, arrived on February 7th. Of the labs that received tests, around six to eight were able to verify that they worked as intended. But a larger number, about thirty-six of them, received inconclusive⁠ results from one of the reagents. Another five, including the New York City and New York State labs, had problems with two reagents. On February 8th, several labs reported their problems to the C.D.C. In a briefing a few days later, Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said that although “we hoped that everything would go smoothly as we rushed through this,” the verification problems were “part of the normal procedures⁠.” In the meantime, she said, until new reagents could be manufactured, all covid-19 testing in the United States would continue to take place exclusively at the C.D.C⁠.

Read more at:
 
Why Hasn’t the U.S. Done More Coronavirus Tests?

1585309746991.png


As cases of COVID-19 continue to spike around the world, the CDC warned on Tuesday that Americans should prepare for the likelihood that the coronavirus will eventually spread here. Amid escalating outbreaks outside of China, it’s clear that there has been undetected transmission of the virus from countries with which the U.S. has not restricted travel. While there has not been a corresponding spike in cases within the U.S., many health experts are warning the coronavirus may already be here. That remains an unknown though — in no small part because the U.S. has done very little testing for the virus. And thanks to problems at the CDC, including the distribution of a faulty test kit for the coronavirus, it’s not clear when the country’s testing capacity will improve.

“We’re testing everybody that we need to test,” President Trump insisted on Wednesday during his first press conference on the coronavirus. He’s almost certainly wrong.

Also on Wednesday, the U.S. confirmed its first coronavirus case of unknown origin — providing the first evidence that the virus is spreading, undetected, inside the U.S. without any known, direct link to the original outbreak in mainland China. It may not be the first undetected outbreak, either. On Monday, the Washington Post reported that at one unnamed hospital in the U.S., clinicians were unable to test a patient who had developed coronavirus-like symptoms after returning from a trip to Singapore.

Read more at:
 

Latest posts

Latest ads

Back
Top