1/ “How did the U.S. fumble its response to the coronavirus so colossally, even with so much lead time? Why, with the number of diagnosed COVID cases in the U.S. climbing toward 4,000, do we still not have nearly enough tests?” gq.com/story/inside-a…
2/ “A large part of the blame lies with President Trump, who has not wanted widespread testing, apparently out of an obsession with keeping the number of confirmed COVID cases low.”
3/ “I would rather have them stay on [the ship], personally,” Trump said earlier this month. “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
4/ “His administration turned down tests provided by the World Health Organization and instead wasted precious time having the Centers for Disease Control create its own test.”
5/ “While that was underway, the president denounced the spread of the disease as a Democratic hoax, giving the public a dangerously false sense of complacency just as a pandemic was getting underway.”
6/ “In the meantime, a more prosaic and bureaucratic tangle of frustrations ensnared those on the front lines of the fight—those like Dr. Greninger, whose struggles offer a window into how the rollout of testing has been bungled, and why the situation isn’t likely to improve. .”
7/ “Back in January, while Greninger was studying the outbreak in China, officials there helpfully published the viral genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes the COVID-19 illness. Greninger immediately took the information and used it to start developing a test.”
8/ “He knew that he’d need to get FDA approval to use the test on patients, but if there was an outbreak coming, he hoped that wouldn’t be a problem.
It was.”
It was.”
9/ “The FDA had granted permission to make testing kits to only one lab: the CDC. Many of those kits had, by early February, been sent to public health labs across the country—and the tests, it turned out, didn’t work.”
10/ “Now, mysteriously ill patients, some of them critically sick, had to wait days for doctors to send their swab to their local public health department, which had the CDC tests, and then wait for the result to come back.”
11/ “Greninger decided to keep going in his effort to create a test that the University of Washington could use in-house. On February 18, he submitted a request to the FDA for . . .permission to develop and use his own coronavirus test.”
12/ “After emailing his application to the FDA, Greninger discovered that it was incomplete. It turned out that in addition to electronically filing it, he also had to print it out and mail a physical copy along with a copy burned onto a CD or saved to a thumb drive.”
13/ “the FDA removed the regulatory hurdles that Greninger had been trying to clear for weeks, and allowed individual labs to begin testing for the novel coronavirus. Greninger and his colleagues at the University of Washington's Virology Lab were ready.”
14/ “There are finite stocks of all of these supplies [needed to run the tests], and neither their manufacturers nor the hospitals purchasing them were counting on a black swan event like a global pandemic.”
15/ “And though we are still in the pandemic’s early stages, hospitals are already running out of supplies.”
16/ “But the reason stocks of these supplies were so low to begin with? Trump’s trade war with China.”
17/ “On March 5, the Trump administration issued an exemption on these made-in-China products—including protective gear for healthcare workers, which is already scarce—but many fear it was too little, far too late.”
18/ “As I speak, we’re running out of supply chains now so I don’t know what our capacity will be in the short term.”
