This is just a straw man. No one is suggesting that they test everyone in the US, but at the level that epidemiologists and the WHO says is absolutely necessary to understand and respond to the spread of the disease.

That they’re not doing testing at anywhere near the necessary levels, while countries like South Korea are, is not “debatable,” but evidence of their failure.

Also your supposition about tracking actual cases is false. Singapore has significantly curbed the spread of the disease by doing extensive contract traces, testing, and quarantines.

It's not a straw man, the spectrum goes from no testing to testing everyone, and _measuring_ "actual cases" accurately (especially after community transmission stage) requires one to be on the latter end of the spectrum. I did say that it's unrealistic to go that far, and you're right that more aggressive testing will obviously lead to better visibility. My point merely was that the rationale for not ramping up testing to the wazoo could be attributed to risk/cost analysis. Incidentally, that might even explain why Singapore with a population half the size of Wuhan's would be able to respond more elastically than the US with a ~300M population and high levels of bureaucracy and government fragmentation.

Btw, I should clarify that when I said the word "debatable", I was using an euphemism.

What is this evidence of this “risk/cost analysis” you keep alluding to? Frontline staff are describing dangerous, chaotic circumstances in hospitals because testing is being delayed:

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-06/chaos-at-ho...

If the US isn’t deploying anywhere near the response of countries with demonstrably curbed spreads in places like Seattle and California, what do you think, explicitly, justifies this? You can’t keep appealing to some greater wisdom without providing some concrete example of it.

I'm not comparing what one country is doing in relation to others. I'm saying that the CDC has their own criteria of what cases qualify for tests. They're not going just wake up one morning and say "yep let's ramp up to 300M test kits because people in the web are up in arms", that's not how it works. They look at the data they have then decide what to do. That's what risk/cost analysis is.

What you seem to be missing from my point is that things take time to do and larger bureaucratic institutions move slower. While the CDC hasn't formally stated the reasons for delays in test ramp up, it's entirely plausible that they're slow to update their analyses, recommendations and action plans because of broken telephones/bureaucracy/politics/etc. If, as the rumors go, the CDC arm needs money to make test kits but the president says "nah can't be that bad", then yeah you can bet things are gonna move very slow.

With all this said, I'm not sure why you are using the word "justify", as if the involved parties are naughty kids to be spanked. I'm not very interested in armchair judgment.

It comes down to the fact that the US is not testing enough people to make ANY sort of assessment, other than that COVID-19 exists here. In South Korea, they have tested enough of their population to make reasonable, even statistically accurate extrapolations. In the US, we may as well not be testing. It does no good at the rate we are doing it. The CDC done fucked up with their initial testing policy, which was likely chosen because they knew that the number of testing kits would bottleneck them to only testing world travellers. This was likely caused by a lack of funding and infrastructure (staff), which is quite clearly caused by our president deciding to fire the people who know how to handle pandemics.