I keep hearing there are too few virus testing kits available.

[Kablooie]

Anyone heard why this is?
Is this due to trump’s changes in the government health departments or is this a problem it would have existed anyway?

[LonePirate]

1. It is possible the limited supply is due to the recent discovery of the virus.

Of course, the incompetence of this administration is the more likely explanation.

[2naSalit]

2. What has been reported on

CNN and MSNBC is that there are too few test kits on top of the fact that a batch they sent out this week were insufficient in some way. Plus the CDC is only testing those with symptoms. On top of that, they are rationing*, it seems, so there may be more than they are letting on but I think they are ill-equipped due to the elimination of the pandemic response team over a year ago. I can only guess as to whose pockets those funds went.

But yes, it is due to lack of preparedness and all that precipitates from that.

*They only have a small number of test kits and testing facilities open in California for obvious reasons... they have the most imported people infected or in quarantine and idiot45 hates California so...

[Brother Buzz]

3. Many of the coronavirus test kits from the CDC are faulty....

and it appears the dude running the show, Vice President Pence, has no compunction to sort it out.

[hedda_foil]

4. It's pretty obvious that the faulty test kits can be traced right back to ...

When you gut the institutions that were set up expressly to respond to emerging diseases and potential pandemics, and defund those you don't destroy, mistakes are going to be made.

[Liberalator]

5. Key Missteps at the CDC Have Set Back Its Ability to Detect the Potential Spread of Coronavirus

[link:https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus-covid-19-test|]

Key Missteps at the CDC Have Set Back Its Ability to Detect the Potential Spread of Coronavirus

The CDC designed a flawed test for COVID-19, then took weeks to figure out a fix so state and local labs could use it. New York still doesn’t trust the test’s accuracy.

by Caroline Chen, Marshall Allen, Lexi Churchill and Isaac Arnsdorf Feb. 28, 12:13 a.m. EST

As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test.

The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.

As a result, until Wednesday the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration only allowed those state labs to use the test — a decision with potentially significant consequences. The lack of a reliable test prevented local officials from taking a crucial first step in coping with a possible outbreak — “surveillance testing” of hundreds of people in possible hotspots. Epidemiologists in other countries have used this sort of testing to track the spread of the disease before large numbers of people turn up at hospitals.