Why Widespread Coronavirus Testing Isn’t Coming Anytime Soon

T This past Thursday, Donald Trump visited the National Response Coordination Center for a teleconference with the nation’s governors about how to handle the covid-19 pandemic. The center, which is situated inside the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, in Washington, is designed, in the agency’s words, to coördinate “the overall Federal support for major incidents and emergencies.” Trump—along with Mike Pence, and several other Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officials—sat around a table in a gray-walled conference room, while the governors were patched in from around the country. The governors said their states needed personal protective equipment (P.P.E.) for health-care workers, ventilators for patients, block grants for their balance sheets, and the National Guard to build hospitals and distribute food. They also needed tests. Kristi Noem, of South Dakota, said that her state’s public-health laboratory—the only lab doing covid-19 testing in the state—had so much trouble securing reagents that it was forced to temporarily stop testing altogether. “We, for two weeks, were requesting reagents for our public-health lab from C.D.C., who pushed us to private suppliers, who kept cancelling orders on us,” she said. In order to get her public-health lab the reagents it needed, Noem said, “we had to get a little pushy with a few people.”

Long article, did not read all of it but the crux is that many of the parts necessary for testing are not made here and are in short supply globally.

CDC got caught flat footed and they also screwed up their test. CDC has done a terrible job.

You can’t quarantine if you don’t test so we are not doing either and this crap has spread like wildfire. CDC has blown it. FDA and NIH have helped blow it.

On the other hand the line of BS by the administration is getting thin. For example:

” Giroir told the governors that, in the twelve days between March 2nd and March 14th, more than ten million tests had been made available in the U.S. And, citing numbers from the F.D.A., he suggested that another seventeen million would be added by March 28th. “We have plenty of tests on the back side. We have plenty of supplies on the front side,” Giroir said. Pence, too, emphasized that “now tens of thousands of more tests are being performed literally every day,” while Trump, responding to Noem’s difficulties securing reagents, told her not to be concerned. “We got you, Kristi,” he said. “There is tremendous supply.”

If there is plenty why doesn’t Kristi have what her state needs. All it takes is a C-17 to move it from where it is to where it isn’t. Simple, we have lots of airplanes not doing anything, load it up and move it if we have a “tremendous supply”. P.T. Barnum and the rest of the circus has spoken.

I’ve been where Kristi is. Being lied to or patronized and knowing it does nothing for your spirits. Being just a cheer leader is only successful so long. The truth, that you want to help but can’t is much better than lies and false hope. People will find a way but counting on help that is promised and does not come is crushing.

Same claims made about food supplies. “Maybe not exactly what you want but the essentials will be readily available.” “Assured the supply chain will be up and running.” Horseshit. There isn’t a bag of flower, a sack of rice, beans, chicken or beef on the shelf around here most days unless you get there right when the truck pulls up. Hoarding you say? I guess so, maybe. Not sure. I’m trying not to leave the farm and haven’t for almost two weeks. No big deal for me, my record is 63 days but my wife goes to town when I don’t. My grocery assessment is second hand from many others I know who have gone to town.

The US response is typical of the nation we have become, not the greatest nation on erf, just one of the gang with lots of bullets, credit and a confidence game of printing money.

What the hell do I know though? My only claim to fame is organizations that never got noticed because we accomplished our mission without drama.

This article is all over the place. I needed Dramamine just to read it. Some very good parts, some contradictory parts, and some possibly too critical parts considering the complexity of the virus problems, supply problems, developmental problems, and some distribution problems.

However, I would think that Aleut eskimos, people in No. Dakota, the desolate areas of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, as well as the mountains of Montana, northern Maine etc., DON’T need every person tested for the virus.

Logic says you go to the central “hotspots” first and start a containment effort there, while looking for other developing hotspots that would be next in line for attention. Where I come from, this is called “prioritizing” and the “triage approach”.

Our air lift logistical capabilities are incredible esp when you add in the Air Forces’ large C17 and C5A lifters.
Drones could be used to airlift some supplies to remote areas in a hurry if they become a hotspot.

The same for our ships, railroad systems, and those great longhaul truck drivers.

The Left in America never understood the physical capabilities of America to respond to an emergency once that emergency was properly identified and surveyed for “needs”.

However, bad and outdated government regulations are one of the greatest obstacles to almost immediate action by private industries/businesses. Glad to see that a lot of these regulations are now gone (Obama and company did nothing but expland regulations to the point that our economy was strangled in many areas of potential growth).

Also, America’s ability to put together the human elements of a national task force, response force, etc., has also been underestimated. Look at who is now working together all over the US with much less bureaucracy and duplications than before.

I’m a specialist in the WW2 industrial mobilization efforts, those of the Korean War (i.e. the Defense Production Act/Agency/Administration), and some post Korean war industrial policies. Pres. Trump has done more in a few months that Roosevelt did in almost a year with the problems of the War Production Board, the Rubber Reserve/Synthetic Rubber programs versus the Aviation Gasoline production programs.

Thank God we had a man like Jeffers, the head of the Union Pacific or Northern Pacific Railroad to stop all the internal power fighting between the Rubber/SynRubber and Avgas factions, become the “czar” of both, and told them to get the hell to work by prioritizing actual versus future needs.

You can’t fly an airplane without Avgas but it won’t get off the ground, even with a full tank, unless you have rubber wheels to help with lift-off. Priority is the key word, as well as knowing what the problems are in the first place.

I like Trump’s national team. Faced with a really new and deadly health challenge, they have gotten organized very early on despite a lack of knowledge about some of the components of the epidemic and have helped kick in our national industrial/private services mobilization to the point that it is running reasonably well for a country of 330 million-plus people.

Time to stop bitching and time to start “pitching” in, as private citizens as well as businessmen, medical personnel, military personnel, etc. Time to start being “Americans” and not ankle-bitters, complainers, and political hacks.

“don’t need every person to be tested” in a given region does not necessarily equate to “no person needs to be tested” in a given region, which seems to be the default decision for south dakota in practice as determined by someone outside of south dakota, following your apparent line of reasoning.

for example, high risk people with symptoms and health care workers need to be tested in every area.

beyond this, people should have a right to reasonable expectation of treatment should it become necessary, including testing if testing becomes reasonably required, so that people at high risk are not forced into researching and committing to plan b and plan c scenarios should the worst hypothetical scenarios actually happen to them.

TLDR.

The beginning of the article seems to be flashing back to weeks ago when few tests were being done. It’s out-of-date now.

Biggest problem the article seems to mention is that there are still officials with the attitude that only “severe” cases be tested. That’s not how you contain the virus with testing. You have to OVERTEST and not only test people who ask for the test, but send out a task force trying to test more and more people who were in an area with an exposed person. You OVERtest, find those sick people who don’t even know they’re sick yet, and quarantine them all. Until we are doing that, this virus will continue to spread for a long time. That’s how South Korea contained out. And there is nothing else that can possibly work. If you rely on people who think they need tests, you will not catch the newly infected who don’t show symptoms yet. And they will continue to spread the virus.

Yes, we can all stay “locked down” to try to stop the spread. But you don’t have a country anymore if you keep doing that. And just like with prohibition, people will not tolerate those restrictions for long and they will sneak around them or throw the people out of office who put in the restrictions and get them lifted.

The virus may be seasonal and come back and may never have a vaccine. The only way to contain it is through unlimited testing and contact-tracing, i.e. offering tests to wide swaths of possible and suspected cases who are not themselves seeking testing.

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