Thread by @Monaheart1229

Important pc @ Seattle Infectious Disease Dr Helen Y. Chu, who took it upon herself to test ppl for #COVID19 in spite of Gov't not giving permission & what she found..
"It's just everywhere already".
Hack on my feed for NYT paywall.. #WednesdayWisdom
nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/…

2-"Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.
What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history.

3-"The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it. “It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.”

4-"In fact, officials would later discover through testing, the virus had already contributed to the deaths of two people, and it would go on to kill 20 more in the Seattle region over the following days.

5-"On Monday night, state regulators told them to stop testing altogether.
[!! Fucking TRUMP]..Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are

6-"struggling to test widely for the coronavirus. The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C.

7-"But it remains unclear how many Americans have been tested for the coronavirus. The C.D.C. says approximately 8,500 specimens or nose swabs have been taken since the beginning of the outbreak — a figure that is almost certainly larger than the number of people tested since

8-"one person can have multiple swabs. By comparison, South Korea, which discovered its first case around the same time as the United States, has reported having the capacity to test roughly 10,000 people a day since late February..." ~NYT