Has No One Considered....

Comments: 

Imagine what it's going to be like when the real testing starts. CDC is already buckling under the pressure. The staff at the hospital my sister is in is furious that the samples they sent from her to Atlanta were, apparently mishandled by them. They've had to treat her like a full blown case even though they can't get her tested. And she's a schoolteacher who was going in to work because she thought she had a bad cold before the pneumonia developed. I would expect that the American numbers are many times higher than they're reporting now.

Delays in testing are a feature, not a bug?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has shipped testing kits to 57 countries. China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week; South Korea has tested 65,000 people so far. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in contrast, has done only 459 tests since the epidemic began. The rollout of a CDC-designed test kit to state and local labs has become a fiasco because it contained a faulty reagent. Labs around the country eager to test more suspected cases—and test them faster—have been unable to do so. No commercial or state labs have the approval to use their own tests.

In what is already an infamous snafu, CDC initially refused a request to test a patient in Northern California who turned out to be the first probable COVID19 case without known links to an infected person.
....
But there’s widespread discontent with the way the system has worked. “The U.S. government has not appropriately prioritized diagnostic tests and supported the laboratory response network to the degree they should have been supported over the years,” says Luciana Borio, who in previous jobs had lead roles in responding to emerging threats at the National Security Council and FDA.

Not that Trump reached into the CDC and told them to screw up the test reagent, but that Trump has so distorted the CDC it is no longer a premier scientific institution.  It certainly screwed this pooch as hard as it could.

And why did that happen?  At this point, it could be because Trump doesn't want the numbers to go up.  It could be because word has gone out informic that the POTUS must be met with only flattering noises and obeisance, lest he take out his sharpie and make whole agencies tremble (remember the effect of that sharpie on NOAA?)  But why did it start this way?  Trump wants to blame Obama and Biden; but the producing cause is much closer in time to the proximate cause that came to light just a few weeks ago.