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Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

The headline is stupid. Its pretty obvious that the transmission happened _before_ they got the patient into an 'ebola-style lockdown'. Based on another sentence in the article, you could change the title to 'Seattle's Coronavirus spread despite a lack of testing in a critical six-week window'.

My point is, its pretty obvious how you slow this thing down, and its not much to do with 'ebola-style lockdowns', its to do with lots of testing, social distancing and hand washing. South Korea has a 2 hour turnaround on tests, in the USA its still 5 days I believe.

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>South Korea has a 2 hour turnaround on tests, in the USA its still 5 days I believe.

Those kinds of inefficiencies don't have to exist. I wish I knew what the bottleneck was there. That time differential is so large that it has to be something pretty braindead that's holding the process up. Like we're still using test kits of type A when we should be using test kits of type B. Or everyone, nationally, is sending tests to a single lab with 2 staffers for evaluation. Etc etc.

The problem is, at once, solved in other places, and at the same time so glaring in our case that there is no way it can be insurmountable. We just have to get our heads out of our butts.

This was what I was thinking. I remember hearing that people are contagious some time before showing symptoms Also a large chunk of people only show mild symptoms. At the minimum all it would take is for them to infect a single person and for that person to only experience minor symptoms or to be not the type that goes to the hospital for some reason. This guy was on a plane 4 days prior. He might not even be the actual original person.

My reaction exactly. A more correct headline would be:

"Patient 0 spread virus prior to Ebola-style lockdown"

But I suppose that doesn't play into the reader's fears as much and therefore may not draw as many clicks.

We've changed the headling above to the article's HTML doc title. That is often a more neutral title.

Not sure what the turnaround time is now, but my wife works in a hospital in Seattle and they were getting tests back in a day or two.

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