This is striking:
"A nation of 51 million, South Korea has tested about 250,000 people since its outbreak began on Jan. 20, with a daily capacity of 15,000. It has conducted 3,600 tests per million people compared to five per million in the U.S."
> It takes anywhere from hours to days to get test results. A doctor with a patient in Boise could have results in a matter of hours, because of proximity to the state laboratory. But samples that go to private labs in Utah and Washington take longer, due to shipping time and the hours it takes to run the tests.
https://www.idahostatesman.com/living/health-fitness/article...
> The coronavirus tests run on the Utah Jazz’s players and team employees came from a good portion of the state of Oklahoma’s supply.
> The 50-plus tests that were run on the Jazz’s traveling party after Rudy Gobert tested positive for COVID-19 were from the state and not a private lab. And the number of tests run on Jazz players represents over half of the state’s daily peak capacity testing levels.
> “We have the capacity to run about 100 tests a day and we have a number of test kits,” Oklahoma commissioner of health Gary Cox said at a Thursday news conference. “We're ordering additional reagents at the time. So, we have the current capacity I think for about 300 tests.” Oklahoma has had three positive cases of the virus so far with four still pending. Thirty-six tests have returned negative.
The market is better at addressing problems than government and if the FDA and CDC hadn't gotten in the way in the US, our testing response would have been far better.
Seegene's kits test for all three marker genes and aren't even available in the US because it doesn't yet have FDA approval. At least 30 other countries are placing orders for Seegene's kits.
bureaucracies, including corporate ones (see: innovator's dilemma), are typically not nimble enough to respond to rapidly changing circumstances. it's not a market vs government (false) dichotomy.
that is the market doing its thing.
The CEO made that decision 4 days before South Korea had its first case.
The market is just shorthand for people.
That is something that “the market” often lacks in their relentless pursuit of shareholder value.
This is nuts. The market doesn't pursue shareholder value. Corporations do. However, the market, which consists of consumers and small producers as much as corporations, certainly does not always, as is seen in consumers (and frankly corporations as well) oftentimes irrational behavior.
And yep, that trade is "market" too. And it does get blamed for a lot of things, some of them unwarranted.
SK is really lucky that they have that company who was focused on testing kits and even uses machine learning to quickly identify viruses. Why doesn't the US have such a company? Is it regulations? Surely not, when something like Theranos was allowed.
There's plenty of demand. Where's the supply? Market failure.