Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response | Hacker News Reader

Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response

nytimes.com

36 pointsshalmanese8 comments

The dichotomy in how we handle privacy is glaring. It grates my nerves that a group of research scientists are told not to do vital testing on swabs they already have to determine the spread of what would become, in a few weeks, a global pandemic. Yet, private companies such as Exactis, tech companies such as Google, stores and banks across the country, can freely collect, exchange, and profit from our personal information without consequence!

Google wouldn't be able to do this testing just like Prof Chu. FDA apply to tech companies, too. Are you trying to say that the dichotomy between PHI or lab testing data and regulation and, say, personal location data is glaring?

Headline kind of buries the lede a bit: clinics had patient samples and tools to test those samples because Seattle was doing an unrelated flu study, but because the samples had only been collected for flu tracking purposes, medical privacy laws forbade testing the kits for the COVID-19 that would also have been present in the samples.

Samples were discovered to be COVID-19 positive only because some doctors in the study chose to break protocol and run the test, and when the CDC caught wind of what they'd done they told the researchers in no uncertain terms to stop doing that test.

The story is a bit of a litmus test for the tradeoff between personal medical privacy and collective medical necessity.

The past several weeks have been a critical time in US, and the lack of testing — I believe — will be a scandal when the dust settles. People are bringing light to the issue, but we’re also living in the moment and trying to gear up for the storm that’s brewing.

Was containment really never an option? Or are we now just going to live with this thing because the response was completely botched?

If I understand correctly (and information is both sketchy and politicized, so I may well not), the US had defective kits (kits that were giving incorrect results). Kits that worked were only available in very limited numbers, if at all.

One of the USA's biggest failures in this crisis is how they somehow managed to make the pandemic a poltical problem. Now they have divided their nation so that now half of the population believes its a hoax

What's interesting to me is that while the divide may be somewhat along pro/anti Trump lines, I've met people on both sides of the Trump issue who believe that current social distancing measures for Covid-19 are much to extreme given the economic costs.

Yes, some of the kits had faulty negative controls. This article is about a lab that developed their own test for their own research on respiratory disease spread though. They didn't use the CDC's tests or the CDC's protocol and that's why they received a cease and desist even though they've probably saved many lives not only in Washington but throughout the country by getting people to see the magnitude of the problem.

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