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Comment by azurezyq | Hacker News Reader

And now CDC is doing the exact same thing in US by not testing extensively, even though they are aware of community spreads. My friends in Seattle area are in great fear.

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There were news that China's health authorities in Hubei and Beijing told local testing companies to return positive samples or destroy those samples during the crucial early days of the spread of the virus[1].

[1]https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/how-early-signs-...

Political and censorship considerations aside, one possible reason for doing this could've been to ensure that the tests were all centralized and "valid" while preventing accidental leakage of the virus from local testing companies. Yet this kind of policy precisely prevented the virus from being quickly identified.

The CDC's focus on the validity of the tests and its refusal to let local hospitals test for the virus mirrors this mistake. Even if the CDC did not actively try to suppress information, it is acting too slow.

This is certainly a wakeup call for anyone who thinks that the US federal bureaucracy is immune to dumb authoritarian tactics. Hopefully this will put a damper on all of those armchair dictators who say things like, "the null policy is still a policy and deserves just as much skepticism." If hospitals had not been prevented by the FDA from using their own machines to run tests, the CDC testing shortage would not have mattered.

CDC botched the first test kits. There was no way to test anyway. Fortunately, FDA approved state developed test kits.

It still seems like they're way behind in testing compared to, say, Italy, which for a while at least was testing sick people and everyone they had come into contact with.

No, hospitals had testing machines. They were banned from using them.

Not calling you a liar, but I haven't heard this part - got any citations?

Former FDA director: (would have linked this originally but I wrote the above reply on the go)

https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottGottliebMD/status/1224042220...

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