The United States badly bungled coronavirus testing, but things may soon improve | Hacker News Reader

The United States badly bungled coronavirus testing, but things may soon improve

sciencemag.org

The CDC has a strong reputation and this would be a rare disappointment.

I think they still deserve benefit of the doubt for now but also owe the public a clear explanation, especially when professional epidemiologists are also puzzled by the situation.

The misstep if true would be particularly regretful for a couple reasons. First, the underlying technology isn’t complicated: PCR [1] is for molecular biology what the hash map might be for software engineering, not simple per se but well understood and widely used. The coronavirus test requires a variation to detect RNA instead of DNA [2] but that still isn’t rocket science. Second, the article points to alternative tests [3] that could probably have been performed safely by many labs in the US if they had the approval.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_transcription_polymera...

[3]: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...

(Edit: It should be noted that PCR can be finicky. But given that labs around the world have been sharing which primers they use, I would hope that the CDC had access to that information, could test those primers in parallel, and pick the ones that performed the best.)

It's impossible to argue that there wasn't a misstep here. They test kits were recalled, and they simultaneously banned states from developing their own local tests - something multiple other countries were able to do with ease.

A PCR test is one of the simplest tests a lab can perform, and while there's some value in centralizing tests - it's ridiculous to tie the hands of local labs while simultaneously stalling the central test kits.

Whenever possible, in massive nation-wide problems like this, we need multiple teams working in parallel. We cannot afford single points of failure like this.

The same is true for vaccine development.

> China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week

China, for all of their faults, is showing what a omnipowerful central government can do in an emergency. Forced quarantines (welding of apartment doors closed), emergency food distribution, hospitals built in 7 days, and instant ramp-up production of tests and drugs

I'm not convinced it's effective considering people across the globe are still being infected. This is just Chinese government dealing with problems in the only way they know how: through inhumane brute force, flailing until the rest of the world solves it for them.

Even if it did spread outside, it gave days and weeks for the rest of the world to prepare to deal with it

Until a western/free government handles an equally bad crisis (on week/month zero), one has to believe what Chinese did is as good as it gets

If China did not hide their numbers, the rest of the world would have taken it seriously earlier?

Cases outside China are, indeed, growing at an exponential rate.

Cases inside China are growing at a sublinear rate.

As far as I can tell, it's the rest of the world (sans a couple countries like Singapore and Taiwan) that are flailing.

Cases in China are growing at a sublinear rate according to the Chinese government.

China is loosening up quarantine regulations, bit by bit.

If their numbers are faked, then they're also being faked to internal decision makers.

And, for what it's worth, the WHO confirms the numbers are broadly accurate.

Careful there. You’re about to be called a shill, and downvoted, or labeled an apologist, for writing anything positive or supportive, about China’s handling of the crisis. It appears HN has become just the same as the braindead Reddit crowd, since most people visit both sites.

China managed to contain it as a pandemic purely to Hubei province. There was almost certainly more internal migration between provinces than there was international migration so we have a sample size of n = 33 successful containment protocols in the face of an unknown number of asymptomatic carriers.

If every country in the world had adopted containment procedures as severe as Chinese provinces, this virus almost certainly wouldn't have been able to gain a foothold and we could have avoided the risk of a global pandemic.

As much as China might be faking numbers, you can't hide a pandemic, the signs are simply too obvious.

Are they also sending supplies and medical help to people they've forcibly welded inside their homes? Seems like that could kill just as many as COVID-19.

In my experience, the actual policy has been to ensure there's just one entrance, in and out of an apartment complex, at which point guards take your temperature and alert authorities if it's elevated.

It's easy to go out and buy groceries, and if you do show symptoms of coronavirus you can rest assured you'll get... help.

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