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Comment by save_ferris | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy how inaccessible testing still is in the US today. We're completely deluding ourselves if we think we can just open everything back up in May or June and everything will return to normal if we still haven't figured testing out.

Who's going to want to risk themselves or their employees if we can't ensure our own safety? Don't get me wrong, it's great that we're seeing signs of the curve flattening. But we're still bungling the Covid response on a daily basis by not making testing easier and more accessible.

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Completely agree. I can't even find good information about what our current testing capacity even is (the numbers on the CDC website are hilariously wrong--New York has almost as many positive cases reported per day as the CDC reports have been run--both positive and negative results--nationally). Further, for whatever reason, I can't find good information from the media about what various levels of government are doing about testing.

It was almost inexcusable in the first month--CDC was clearly planning for an outbreak on the order of thousands of people in total (tiny reserve of masks and ventilators, severely limited testing capacity, etc), but now it's been a month that South Korea has had drive through testing facilities and by all appearances our CDC still doesn't even know how many tests are performed per day much less how it's going to scale up testing so we can "reopen our economy".

> by all appearances our CDC still doesn't even know how many tests are performed per day much less how it's going to scale up testing so we can "reopen our economy".

A few weeks ago, IIRC, the CDC said that since the states were providing all the numbers, it wasn't going to bother doing any collation.

It strongly looks to me that the federal government has given up trying to help, being led by someone who is utterly incompetent to the task demanded of him. The response at this point is largely being driven by the 50 state governments + various territories + DC, with the president hoping to steal all the credit and avoid any blame whatsoever. And the rest of the federal government seems to be unwilling or unable to take charge of the response.

By no means has Trump done a good job, but I don't think he deserves credit or blame for masks or the testing fiasco. CDC exists to prepare for and manage exactly this scenario and as far as I can tell, it's done neither. There's lots the president can do (and much of which he's failed to do) as well, so there's no shortage of blame to levy at him and his administration, but I'm far more concerned about the CDC's failure because the CDC will outlast any particular president.

But he shut down the department that was especially created to make sure the US is prepared to health crisis like COVID-19?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-fire-pandemic-team/

Yeah, that was dumb. But the job of that team was to coordinate with the CDC, it wasn't the CDC. There's lots of blame to go around and much of it to POTUS, but the CDC failed in its most fundamental capacity and unlike POTUS, CDC has no term limits so we need to hold them accountable.

@jcranmer absolutely agree. This is maddening, and unfortunately we all can't do much except sit at home and watch this train wreck. Can't protest, complaints are seen as partisan attacks, and trying to volunteer locally to help out with something that involves leaving the house is seen as either incredibly risky or frowned upon by the mask police. It's driving me nuts.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

it has tests and tests per million as columns. Have no idea where the data comes from.

https://covidtracking.com/data , a project started by The Atlantic, currently seems to be the best aggregation of the data.

This is the main reason why a lot of people believe the numbers are underreported. A lot of people are dying without ever having had a test and are not even counted as a COVID-19 death.

Oped on the matter: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-04-01/corona...

They absolutely are underreported, but I believe every country (except maybe South Korea and Singapore) is underreporting cases, even Canada isn't doing great in this regard.

That said the US seems to be doing even worse in terms of testing and unfortunately has a spokesman that constantly lies to the world.

Earning an income is an important component of self-preservation, and many people would be willing to risk getting the virus if they could go back to work.

Millions of people have been laid off or furloughed and cannot find other work because businesses in their industries have been forced to close indefinitely. Some of them may not have money left to feed their children. They definitely would go back to work if they could.

But who's going to visit these people? Many of the laid off are in service industries.. Who is going to travel or go to restaurants if they could catch a deadly disease from doing so?

If people were sheltering in place by choice, the lockdowns wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

People were going to bars and restaurants in NYC and the Bay Area up until the lockdowns started. I think a lot of people would start living relatively normally again -- health officials want the lockdowns extended because they know that.

This seems to be the plan, beyond modestly trying to grow supplies for medical response.

The U.S. is not ramping up a slew of mask production lines, unlike, say, Singapore.

We're not ramping up testing capacity to the point where we can have every person wearing a high-quality mask and getting tested to start contact-tracing regimes.

I wish the federal government stepped up here.

>Who's going to want to risk themselves or their employees if we can't ensure our own safety?

LOTS of people will, and we can reduce the risk with masks. Provide them to employees, require they wear them, maybe require customers wear them too.

I don't want a mask, or a test. I just want to be left alone to get a bad cough once in a while.

Remind me again how many flu deaths we had this season?

covid is currently killing more people per day than the flu on a bad season, and that's with a lockdown.

Check out flu deaths vs. COVID deaths in New York for the past couple years:

https://i.redd.it/u3fx3aw1n6s41.jpg

That's with a complete lockdown. What do you think that chart would look like if people were just 'left alone to get a bad cough'?

> What do you think that chart would look like if people were just 'left alone to get a bad cough'?

quite similar if it's as contagious as we're told.

Flu (2020): About 600 deaths per day at peak, 14,000 total in US.

Coronavirus: 1400-2000 deaths per day now, 23,000 total so far, still climbing.[2]

USA #1 in coronavirus deaths! [1]

[1] https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-death...

seems easy to get counted as a COVID death, ya?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/coronavirus/Alert-2-New-I...

https://twitter.com/PeterRQuinones/status/125020387852143820...

Doesn't seem like there are enough masks for this either though. The US is going to need literally billions of masks that are distributed to the population.

Are we doing everything we can to ramp up production as fast as possible?

even home mad masks are effective.

No. Even N95 is even a joke considering the airborne contagiousness of covid19. N95 literally means non-oil-resistant, 95% filtration efficiency. I'll continue to wear my P100 safety mask while the lazy minded cling to the word N95 like it is some panacea or bastion of protection, whilst being statistically trashgutter. Most people have no idea what N95 even means, treating it like some model number. I'm pretty sure that the seal on a mask that secures like a party hat is not good enough when an airborne contaminant is in play..

Let's all just keep using rubber band party hat masks while the intelligent among us sport the P100 eliteness. /s

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/topics/respirators/factsheet...

https://i.imgur.com/cPTZf6h.png

Effective at what?

reducing the chance you will spread the virus to others and to a lesser degree reducing the chance you get it yourself.

No. One company that makes masks says they're not expanding production. The last time they did, as soon as the crisis was over the hospitals started ordering from China again. They had a huge stock of unsold masks, and almost went bankrupt even after layoffs.

That's the free market.

This is where the US government could step in. The federal government should mandate a certain level of production and guarantee purchase of those masks, if folks abuse these bids we should pursue them hard in court like we did in WWII... I mean, if the courts are going to actually hold folks to account, that's the big question.

The U.S. Army does that for ammo, with big government-owned munitions plants. Many production lines are mothballed, but can be started up if needed. There's little demand for artillery projectiles in peacetime, and a huge demand in wartime.

The free market is also 3M realizing after the SARS outbreak in 2003 that something like this might happen again, and building surge capacity into its manufacturing plants. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-25/3m-double...

Unfortunately, the CDC learned no such lesson and continued to operate as though no widespread contagious disease could possibly break out on US soil, as they had virtually no stockpile of masks nor even plans to secure the mask supply chain, etc (not to mention their testing strategy only scaled to hundreds of cases per day). I suppose that's the unitary state.

Of course, the CDC should have a serious reserve of masks (and other general equipment for the most likely outbreaks) and plans to secure the supply chain, including partnering with private industry to make sure they can operate at an increased capacity in case of emergency. There's no fundamental reason that our federal agencies have to be incompetent with respect to their fundamental purpose.

True enough, but the CDC discretionary budget was tiny. In order to establish a significant stockpile they would have needed a budget line item from Congress. So Congress certainly deserves a portion of the blame for lack of foresight.

I don’t buy that argument because:

1. Masks were dirt cheap and certainly useful for any serious epidemic or bioterrorism event or just about any other emergency scenario for which the CDC would be called upon (our reserves were in the tens of thousands, but those masks sell for cents apiece—could have had a million masks for ~$500K)

2. The CDC didn’t even have plans to secure the supply chain, and plans are damn near free

3. The CDC was budget constrained but went and developed its own test instead of using the WHO test?

EDIT: Updated math figure

>could have had a billion masks for ~$500K

Something is seriously off with your math.

Only 3 orders of magnitude. :)

Thanks for the correction.

3M can crank up production by 2x short term, and much more in 12 months, by which time it may be too late.

That will help, but it certainly can't facilitate all of the normal consumer behavior that the economy relies on. How do you drink at a bar or eat at a restaurant with a face mask on? Would you event want to?

It might help people be more comfortable performing essential tasks in public, but as long as we're seeing thousands of deaths per week on the news, people by and large are going to stay home if they can.

Is that the track record we've set? Does everyone who currently need masks to work get them - like nurses and doctors and folks working in shipping warehouses? Because there is a lot of contrary evidence to that.

https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-workers-pandemic-risks-ow...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-warehouse-workers-staten...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2020/04/11/corona...

Part of me wonders if testing is kept to a minimum on purpose because lower numbers would help the push to open the economy back up (speaking about US here). But then the other part of me thinks that's just my brain being conspiratorial, because who would be evil enough to do that?

We’ve run ~2.9MM tests so far. I think it’s likely testing capacity will get there by mid to late may. Especially if we find cheaper and faster anti body tests (which is a huge focus right now).

May sounds pretty reasonable up here in Canada - I'm concerned that the US still isn't ramping up production fast enough though. Trump is... and idiot - yea sure whatevers, but right now he's really doing harm by constantly talking about how close to being over this America is - it is causing a lot of companies that could ramp up production to be more conservative since they're worried they might be left with a lot of debt and a lot of unsalable stock.

A bit of context: this is far, far more than any other country - Germany is second with 1.3M tests, and only two other countries have done over a million [0]. Per capita, we're about middle of the pack for well developed countries (excluding very small micro-nations).

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

You do realize that we have done more than DOUBLE the number of tests than the next country in the world (Germany), right? That's 2.9m tests vs 1.3m. The infrastructure to support testing can't magically expand over night. The hypochondriacs are consuming many of those tests, with positive tests being a tiny portion of that 2.9m number.

>Who's going to want to risk themselves or their employees if we can't ensure our own safety?

Me. I will risk myself. And most of my friends, too.

At least you admit you'd be risking your friends as well.

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