CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation for months to come

Re:CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation f... by Svip on Tuesday March 24, 2020 @06:11PM (#22679624)

To clarify. The WHO did not offer the US tests. The Politico article just says that the US was not on the list of countries it offered tests. It never offers the US tests, because it has national labs that can make their own tests. The WHO only gives tests to countries who do not have a national infrastructure of their own to build tests.

But the WHO did recommend the Berlin tests, as it had no false positives, and was quickly able to isolate the virus from other coronaviruses, something the initial CDC test was not able to.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/16/joe-biden/...

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Re:CDC coronavirus testing decision likely to haunt nation f... by fabian2k on Tuesday March 24, 2020 @06:22PM (#22679730)

Just as additional information for anyone interested, this is the paper about the development of the test distributed by the WHO:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6988269/

This was published on January 23, and it contains all the information you need to establish this kind of test in your own lab. And while I'm not an expert in this area, the controls done to ensure avoiding false positives based on other viruses seem pretty thorough to me. And this validation is the part that I would suspect to be one of the more time-consuming and important aspects.

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