“Think long-term, at least twice as long as you think you need.”

….especially as the numbers appear to be about as bad as predicted a few weeks ago.

is still a nightmare. A colossal failure.

BTW, my student that I mentioned did not have COVID-19. It took 8 days to get the results back. He didn’t have influenza either. But some virus gave him pneumonia. He is 20 years old. He was released from the hospital yesterday.

As last I knew—source a friend who’s a pathologist at Mayo (my daughter’s future father in law no less)—over half a million tests have been administered (I’m guessing more than 600k now) and processed, and the big issues are a fairly high rate of false negatives, an unknown rate of false positives, and (this is most likely the issue Mark alludes to) health systems that aren’t getting the tests promptly into the queue.

Either that, or (rightly or wrongly) the student’s symptoms put his test on a “low priority” queue because the symptoms didn’t quite match what they were expecting. And in a country where we’re getting something like 500 deaths per day, you’ve got to extend some grace to doctors to make judgment calls like that. I don’t have the charts or know how to read them, but this is something we need to make peace with.

I’m alluding to the failure of the original CDC designed test 2 months ago that led to the failure of the testing regime to stop the virus during the early period. There are only about 5000 articles on the internet about it.

Mark, yes, what you describe is all over, but it’s been a month since the CDC allowed private labs to test and three weeks since private sector tests went live. Here’s a summary. The correct statement is not that it “is” a debacle, but rather that it “was” a debacle that rapidly disappeared once the government got out of the way.

So let’s keep up with the current news, OK? Here’s today’s news, for example. Pretty darned good if you ask me.

Now if only we can have as good of news regarding social distancing efforts and their results.

There has been just a little less than 1M tests conducted. Of those, we are at about 16% that come back confirmed positive. We have done more tests than any other country. But not as many per capita. We are quickly eclipsing that and given the current rate, should be performing more tests per capita than any other country sometime early next week. With the ramp up of testing though, we are not seeing an equally ramp up in confirmed cases per day. 5 days ago the number of confirmed cases was about 17.5K and today it is just a hair over 20K. The number of new cases is starting to slow dramatically in terms of rate of increase, which is causing the total confirmed cases to bend from an exponential curve to a linear curve.

Abbott did release the rapid test, but not clear how long it will take to reach the front lines. It will be a game changer. The US can sometimes be late to the game, but we quickly catch up.