Opinion piece written by an ER doctor.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health...-coronavirus-testing-failures-will-cost-lives
The other night, I had a patient in the ER where I work come in with fever, cough and shortness of breath. It would have been a routine visit, if not for the novel coronavirus currently sweeping the globe. The patient was concerned about the virus, and so were we. She had recently traveled to a conference in a country with known cases of COVID-19, as the disease caused by the coronavirus is called. She was middle-aged and had HIV, which we worried could increase her risk of serious illness from the virus. We contacted the department of health, where all testing in my state is currently performed, to request permission to test for the coronavirus.
The verdict? Denied....
Every ER doctor that I work with already has several stories like this.....
....why are we still facing such strict limitations on who we can test? There isn't a clear answer, but it seems to be a function of a woefully inadequate supply of test kits. In other words, what few tests we do have are being rationed for the people who need them most, like those requiring hospital admission....
Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute,
told NPR on Thursday that the United States' response has been "much, much worse than almost any other country that's been affected." He reached for words like "stunning," "fiasco" and "mind-blowing" to describe the situation.....
The total failure to ensure that adequate testing would be available will likely prove to be the single most important factor in why the United States has been unable to contain the outbreak. As
previously
reported by NPR, Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea all deployed an aggressive testing strategy very early on. This allowed them to find the first few cases and isolate them, preventing unchecked community spread.....
This failure represents a profound abdication, at the highest levels of government, of responsibility to the health and security of the American population generally and of more vulnerable populations especially. Public health experts have known of the exceptional risk posed by novel coronaviruses for more than 20 years, but the current administration limited funding to the CDC and disbanded a White House unit expressly dedicated to preparing for a pandemic just like this one. Public statements from the top echelons of our government — false comparisons to seasonal influenza, wildly misleading promises about access to testing, reassurances that everything is "perfect" — continue to seed confusion and erode trust.....