I think everyone would like to see the CDC be better funded. Hindsight makes that an obvious mistake, but monitoring C19 should have been their number one priority in any case. From January onwards it was clear that it was the number one threat. There's still no explanation (afaik) for why they rolled their own test instead of using the WHO's test, nor have they effectively communicated their plans for ramping up testing or medical capacity. I don't see how this is anything besides mismanagement (e.g., how does funding impact which test they used? Presumably being under-funded would prompt them to use the test that the rest of the world is going with instead of rolling their own), and I really hope congress or the justice dept rips into this after the crisis is averted.

EDIT: Note that I say all of this as someone who is a big believer in "it's almost always more complicated/nuanced than it looks", but there seems to be no information about said nuance or complexity.

There seems to be a really obvious explanation of why they rolled their own test instead of using the WHO's test: there was no WHO test when they did it, the two different tests were developed in parallel (and they're not the only country which developed their own test either, there are something like seven different ones used in various countries). The CDC had already been using its own test internally when the WHO announced the alternative German one they'd been using. Then when the CDC test didn't work when rolled out to labs, it's not like the WHO could have supplied them with testing kits instead. The CDC would have had to produced the WHO-designed test itself, verified it worked, arrange for it to be mass produced, and hope that the same problem didn't happen - all whilst their test rollout was massively delayed by essentially starting from scratch. Most of the media just doesn't seem to be interested in explaining this.

I didn't see any such explanation on the CDC page either, and I thought I was pretty thorough in searching for it. I did know that they were developed concurrently, but I'm unaware of any information about why they couldn't at any point pivot and use the WHO test, for example. Why is this information so hard to find?

There was this medical person on the white house press meeting yesterday and she said that the WHO test had terrible false positive rate (she said 45% but that doesn't sound right)

The problem is not the CDC developing their own test.

The problem is their banning the use of other tests for months!

Only by Dr Helen Chu finally ignoring that ban was the Seattle outbreak discovered.

They should have been developing more than one test anyway. This reduces the risk of failure, and if you get multiple working tests, it allows some cross-checking to reduce false results. Failure to diversify is also mismanagement (though clearly more money can help you try more things).

I don't agree at all. The WHO had a working test. We just needed to produce as many of them as we possibly could, and send them to labs to set up and validate.

They needed every resource they had going to the confirmed working test. Even if the CDC was better funded, they still would have needed to spend every resource on that.

> There's still no explanation (afaik) for why they rolled their own test instead of using the WHO's test

The explanation is obvious, isn't it? "We thought our test would work, and it would be better."

It was stupid, to be sure. It would have been a stupid risk even if it had paid off—although in that case, few would be chastising them, and many would be thankful.

Agree, and that's kind of my point. Being "fully funded" wasn't the problem--it was hubris/mismanagement.

So, I think this is the most frustrating part of living in this political era. I did start this off with "funding", but it wasn't just funding, it was cutting qualified staff. It's that even the best qualified staff aren't moving fast enough or adapting and looking at cases beyond our own borders. Even in a reduced regulation environment, the FDA is likely hampering response time.

The US has regressed to an early 19th century model of government (loosely federated) at a time we're more tightly coupled than we ever have been due to moderinity.

>> fully funded CDC

Is there evidence that more money would have solved the constant CDC problems and incompetencies that are coming up? It seems like a throwaway obvious statement, but plenty of government agencies - and private companies - don't operate a lot more effectively with more money.

Totally agree, and in one of my other responses I recognize the shortcomings of how I put it. Thanks for the good faith response.

with more money, the CDC would not have delivered one non working test, but like 2 or 3 non working tests.

Bingo. On Feb 18, China released the 6th edition of its treatment guidelines that included a Chloroquine recommendation. They've subsequently updated that guidance to reduce the dose

On Feb 19, Chinese authorities published this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32074550 which provides basically no details except that Chloroquine works.

Everyone who was paying attention saw this. The U.S. gov should have started ramping up production at that time, but four days later Trump tweeted "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA... Stock market starting to look very good to me!"