Another explanation for the COVID-19 testing backlog in California — hospitals & clinics are using slower, bottlenecked testing pipelines instead of fast academic labs that have capacity to spare
This is quite a quote that @amymaxmen got from a UC Berkeley scientist who runs a testing lab: "I don’t want to be disparaging, but the people who made the CDC kit simply failed at molecular biology — they created a nightmare.” nature.com/articles/d4158…
@amymaxmen OMG this Berkeley guy. "The business of American medicine and the way it is organized is astonishingly unprepared for this… I show up in a magic ship, with 20,000 free kits… and the major hospitals say: ‘Go away, we cannot interface with you.’” nature.com/articles/d4158…
@amymaxmen So, to sum up: There's a guy at UC Berkeley who had 20,000 free test kits to offer, and the only taker he could find in the Bay Area was a nonprofit org that tests homeless people??? Meanwhile, counties are rationing their tests & don’t have enough for nursing homes w/ outbreaks.
@amymaxmen This is great reporting and gives a really astonishing and granular picture of the banal day-to-day procedural stuff that is going wrong in the testing chain. nature.com/articles/d4158…
