To: Arthur Radley who wrote (324107 ) 3/25/2020 10:04:55 PM From: Sun Tzu Respond to I don't, and I can't. As I said in an earlier post, when you see the new cases flatten out, it's either b/c we are at the inflection point or because they have stopped testing/reporting.FYI, using this methodology, as of now there are 170k infections in the US. Kristi Noem, of South Dakota, said that her state’s public-health laboratory—the only lab doing covid-19 testing in the state—had so much trouble securing reagents that it was forced to temporarily stop testing altogether. “We, for two weeks, were requesting reagents for our public-health lab from C.D.C., who pushed us to private suppliers, who kept cancelling orders on us,” she said. In order to get her public-health lab the reagents it needed, Noem said, “we had to get a little pushy with a few people.” ... The next day, the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, the Association of Public Health Laboratories, and the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists—which, together, represent virtually the whole of the country’s state-level public-health infrastructure—issued a joint statement warning about “widescale shortages of laboratory supplies and reagents” for covid-19 testing. Because of these shortages, the statement said, testing ought to be reserved for three groups of suspected cases: health-care workers and first responders; the elderly, especially those who live in nursing homes and other group settings; and people for whom a confirmed covid-19 diagnosis had the potential to meaningfully change their treatment plan, such as those with underlying health conditions. An alert sent out earlier in the day by New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene was even more dire. Mildly or moderately ill people seeking covid-19 tests, the D.O.H.M.H. warned, posed a serious infection risk for hospitals and clinics, and were creating a run on the city’s extremely limited P.P.E. stocks and testing supplies. For that reason, the department was “directing healthcare facilities to IMMEDIATELY STOP TESTING NON-HOSPITALIZED PATIENTS FOR COVID-19 unless test results will impact the clinical management of the patient.” Even health-care workers and first responders who had been exposed to infected patients but did not have symptoms would no longer be tested. As the alert went on to warn, again in bold capital letters: “COVID-19 testing is only indicated for HOSPITALIZED PATIENTS.”
