Thanks for the great work you are doing with the numbers.
Just to clear some of the fog around testing: HOW MANY TESTS we have done compared to another country is meaningless.
We do not even have the ability to test rapidly when the diagnosis is in question, which leads to overconsumption of ICU negative pressure rooms and critically short supplies of PPE.
But that’s not the problem.
The problem is our failure to find and to isolate all the presymptomatic infections, and to isolate THEM to prevent the explosive spread we are seeing now. Countries that have stayed ahead of the curve and stayed in business (Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong) have tested huge fractions of their populations and intervened on spreaders before they got to third and fourth generation spread.
Take little New Hampshire, which has around 500 cases this morning. We do not know how many infections not yet showing symptoms those 500 people have caused. We don’t know where those presumably thousand or so asymptomatic spreaders live, where they go, what they do, or how many people they infect before they themselves develop symptoms.
NH has geographic and demographic advantages not present in NY NJ CT or Massachusetts. We have socially minded people sitting at home sewing masks for their local hospitals and making do with their stockpiled food. Everybody is more polite than normal, nicer than normal. Children in local communities are writing letters to our hospitals to thank us,
The only thing we don’t have is what we need, which is information to stop the 2-10 people getting infected today from each infected person without symptoms.
Leaders saying “we have tested more people than any other country” are saying something meaningless. If we had done 50 million tests by March 5 we might have gotten ahead of this thing. Now, we won’t, and it’s not because of the advisory panel, its because of FDA resistance, and I would not be surprised if that resistance had a political motivation.