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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sylvester80 who wrote (1219435)	4/11/2020 5:39:22 PM
From: puborectalis	2 Recommendations Recommended By pocotrader sylvester80 Respond to of 1579954

The federal government "made it very difficult for private labs, for university labs to make their own test based on certain regulatory hurdles," said Amesh Adalja, a physician and infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. It shouldn't have been that way, Adalja and other scientists said. The CDC's 2018 plan, created following the Zika outbreak two years earlier, was meant to prevent the very testing shortfalls and obstacles that have been unfolding since Covid-19 arrived in the US. The agreement, obtained by CNN, calls for extensive coordination, planning, exercises and constant communication between the CDC, the public labs and the commercial sector. It was designed to leverage the full weight of the nation's wide-ranging scientific community, and rapidly boost "national laboratory testing and strengthen future responses to public-health emergencies." But, smothered by bureaucratic inertia and disinterest at the highest levels of the Trump Administration in pandemic preparation, that agreement, known as a memorandum of understanding, today remains far from being fully realized, scientists say. "What we needed was extremely aggressive leadership at the CDC level and at the national level to say, okay, these are all our plans... I don't think there was really a realization of the magnitude of the problem," said Glenn Morris, director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida. As late as January 28, in an email obtained by CNN, CDC Director Robert Redfield told state public health directors that "the virus is not spreading in the U.S. at this time and CDC believes the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is low." But lab directors and epidemiologists said the likely magnitude of the problem was crystal clear to them much earlier. "We certainly said on many conference calls with the CDC during those times that we really needed to expand lab testing," in January and early February, said Dr. Jeffrey Engel, a senior adviser on Covid-19 for the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists "Our members were telling the CDC that we needed testing capacity for a public health surveillance because we felt that the virus might be circulating in the US as early as January and we should be testing for that now." A week before Redfield's email, on January 21, officials in Washington state confirmed that the first case on US soil had been detected there two days earlier. Becker said the intent behind the 2018 coordination plan was "a good thing" that did improve communication between the government and commercial labs, but that there was a failure to get those outside the government launched on the testing effort early in process. "You can add this," he said, "...to the list of things that could have been better in this response."