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Comment by dimator | Hacker News Reader

you're right, testing is the long term solution. you can't control what you can't measure.

the embarrassing point is that in the US, isolation is the only effective tool at this point. it's embarrassing because ramping up testing was what South Korea did, and they started much sooner, and that's why they are over the hump now. the US simply doesn't have the testing scaled up.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-testin...

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Testing is only part of it. Korea never mass tested the population at large.

They traced the chains of the infections and quarantined everyone until they were tested clean. They found new chains through sick people who were tested.

Without investigation and tracing the chain of infections, you can't contain it through testing alone.

And the fact that were was an undetected outbreak in the west coast of the United States for several weeks probably made containment impossible, even using the South Korean model.

Yep. I keep seeing people saying Korea tested everyone, but they only tested ~0.5% of their population.

I think they mean they tested "everyone they could"

Testing is rising extremely quickly in the US. Over 27,000 in the last 24 hours: https://covidtracking.com/us-daily/

What's interesting is that the rate of negative results seems to be roughly constant. I would expect that with an expansion of testing we would see many more negative results as a proportion (if we were allocating tests early only to the most likely cases and are now expanding the reach of testing)

My guess is that we're still short on tests, so only people who most likely have the virus are getting tested.

Pence promised 4 million last week.

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-03-10/...

There's a difference between distributed and utilized. Is that confusing?

The US neither (1) didn't take it seriously enough, and (2) CDC's initial test kits didn't work properly.

Korea and other nations in the area took it seriously due to their proximity to China and previous recent experience with infectious disease: HK experienced SARS, Korea experienced MERS.

The US could have used the WHO test in the meantime.

I've read that it couldn't. Those kits were never offered to the US: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/18/health/who-coronavirus-tests-...

couldn't? sounds like the US didn't even try asking. the article says: "No discussions occurred between WHO and the CDC about providing tests to the United States"

and

"US chose to design its own coronavirus test"

CDC and/or FDA also banned everyone in the country from doing tests themselves.

And more importantly, the Administration never stepped in to fix it no matter how obvious a problem it was causing. It took them ages to have the FDA make an emergency exception to allow private testing.

actually reshaping FDA policy in the time they did is nothing short of miraculous. I know teams of 5 that can't change their way of doing things that fast.

> actually reshaping FDA policy in the time they did is nothing short of miraculous.

Yeah no. Not remotely. It was dead obvious. I think you're underestimating the influence a call from the head of the executive branch has. This was easily fixable weeks earlier.

Not really that embarrassing considering how big the US is, it's about as embarrassing as when European countries brag about their choice metrics.

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