[M T]

The main issue again is our prevalence. If this thing wasn't raging everywhere we'd surely have results uniformly in less than 24 hrs.

The CDC reports it was told of 1.9M tests last week.  That's roughly 270,000 tests per day.  Just a drop in the bucket when you compare it to every day items that are mass produced around the country.  I found this "In 2017 in the United States alone, an estimated 65 billion 12 oz. beers were consumed, along with over 4 billion bottles of wine."  That's 1.25B bottles of beer all in all per week (about 650x the number of tests).  You can't spin up such production or the distribution chain in 6 months.

Is COVID hitting the US harder than we thought even in mid-May?  Certainly.  SCC scaled its tracing for a maximum of 75 cases per day.  L.A. County scaled for a peak of 2500 (they peaked about 3300, averaging 2000 per day over the week).   And, California isn't the hardest hit area.  I suspect the supply & production of reagents were scaled for less disease than we have.

(For comparison, Wuhan tested its entire city over a 2 week period:  9.9M tests in 17 days (582K tests per day) beginning May 14.  Can you imagine the squawking if NYC or LA tried to require every one to take a test?)

[M T]

The main issue again is our prevalence. If this thing wasn't raging everywhere we'd surely have results uniformly in less than 24 hrs.

The CDC reports it was told of 1.9M tests last week.  That's roughly 270,000 tests per day.  Just a drop in the bucket when you compare it to every day items that are mass produced around the country.  I found this "In 2017 in the United States alone, an estimated 65 billion 12 oz. beers were consumed, along with over 4 billion bottles of wine."  That's 1.25B bottles of beer all in all per week (about 650x the number of tests).  You can't spin up such production or the distribution chain in 6 months.

Is COVID hitting the US harder than we thought even in mid-May?  Certainly.  SCC scaled its tracing for a maximum of 75 cases per day.  L.A. County scaled for a peak of 2500 (they peaked about 3300, averaging 2000 per day over the week).   And, California isn't the hardest hit area.  I suspect the supply & production of reagents were scaled for less disease than we have.

(For comparison, Wuhan tested its entire city over a 2 week period:  9.9M tests in 17 days (582K tests per day) beginning May 14.  Can you imagine the squawking if NYC or LA tried to require every one to take a test?)