[Goose]

"We were never really blind when it came to surveillance" for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, CDC chief Robert Redfield said. Even if widespread diagnostic testing had been in place, it would have been like "looking for a needle in a haystack," he said.

This statement seems totally bogus to me. How can you detect community transmission if you only allow testing of people with known exposure? Case in point: the Feb. 6 death in SCC that was recently discovered to be due to Covid-19 and is now thought to be the earliest known example of community transmission within SCC. The County coroner who performed the autopsy on Feb. 7 suspected Covid-19 but was unable to test her for it because she didn't meet testing criteria. 

If widespread testing was in place every urgent care center and ER on the west coast would have been testing every patient with a cough back in February.

Unfortunately, even if the CDC didn't have problems with their manufacturing process, there was never a plan to distribute the tests to every urgent care center or ER on the west coast or anywhere else. The CDC was going to (and did) distribute the tests to every state lab. After that, they would validate at least 5 tests from each state and then declare victory. That was the plan. One might conjecture at this point that plan was flawed.

We can't know what would have happened if the level of testing had be much higher than it was. It would be speculative. That said, what do people thing would have changed? Honest question, I have no opinion (yet) and would like to hear the ideas about this. I do think random testing wouldn't have helped much, as the number of positives would have been so small it would haver been meaningless. Targeted testing of people showing symptoms would be another matter.

[Goose]

"We were never really blind when it came to surveillance" for covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, CDC chief Robert Redfield said. Even if widespread diagnostic testing had been in place, it would have been like "looking for a needle in a haystack," he said.

This statement seems totally bogus to me. How can you detect community transmission if you only allow testing of people with known exposure? Case in point: the Feb. 6 death in SCC that was recently discovered to be due to Covid-19 and is now thought to be the earliest known example of community transmission within SCC. The County coroner who performed the autopsy on Feb. 7 suspected Covid-19 but was unable to test her for it because she didn't meet testing criteria. 

If widespread testing was in place every urgent care center and ER on the west coast would have been testing every patient with a cough back in February.

Unfortunately, even if the CDC didn't have problems with their manufacturing process, there was never a plan to distribute the tests to every urgent care center or ER on the west coast or anywhere else. The CDC was going to (and did) distribute the tests to every state lab. After that, they would validate at least 5 tests from each state and then declare victory. That was the plan. One might conjecture at this point that plan was flawed.

We can't know what would have happened if the level of testing had be much higher than it was. It would be speculative. That said, what do people thing would have changed? Honest question, I have no opinion (yet) and would like to hear the ideas about this. I do think random testing wouldn't have helped much, as the number of positives would have been so small it would haver been meaningless. Targeted testing of people showing symptoms would be another matter.