CORONAVIRUS TESTING SHOULDN'T BE THIS COMPLICATED [View all]

[iluvtennis]

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/17/21184015/coronavirus-testing-pcr-diagnostic-point-of-care-cdc-techonology

The US reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on January 21st. Eight weeks later, there still aren’t enough tests for the virus available for everyone who needs them. “It is a failing,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a House briefing last week. “The system is not really geared to what we need right now.”

People who are sick or have been in contact with sick people are struggling to get tested. Until last week, the number of tests that could be run per day in the United States was limited to around 7,000. Labs are struggling to get the supplies they need to meet the demand.

At the center of all of this chaos is a relatively straightforward type of test called a polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, that’s been around for decades. To run it, a doctor swabs a patient’s nose or throat and sends the sample to a lab. The lab then looks for tiny snippets of the virus’s genetic material. PCR analysis is complicated but reliable.

“If the health system is working well, those tests should be good and help us manage this epidemic,” says Catherine Klapperich, director of the Laboratory for Diagnostics and Global Healthcare Technologies at Boston University. “It’s frustrating that the testing we thought we could rely on didn’t roll out the way we expected it to.”

PCR works. But in an outbreak situation, even if it’s working well, it’s still too slow. Ideally, physicians would be able to run tests in an office or right at a patient’s bedside. The technology to test that way exists. But there hasn’t been a large-scale investment made to commercialize it, so there’s no clear pathway to get it up and running during an emergency.

“Point of care testing is required for these outbreak situations. We’re just not quite there yet as a scientific community,” Klapperich says.

{{cuts}}

The German test adopted and disseminated by the WHO scanned for three specific viral genes. Countries around the world were able to adopt and scale that test. South Korea, for example, quickly started testing around 10,000 people each day for the virus. So far, South Korea has tested around 250,000 people.

Instead of using the WHO protocol, the CDC decided to create its own test using three different genes from the German test. That’s not an entirely unusual decision — the agency also created its own test during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2015. But when some state labs tried to validate the test, it appeared to cause false positive results. The agency had to redesign and remanufacture test kits, which contributed to the delays in getting widespread testing up and running.

{{cuts}}

Experts say the lag time and slow rollout was confusing. South Korea is working with the same technology as the US and was able to ramp up testing much more rapidly — although, notably, it doesn’t have the same regulatory barriers that the US does. But the US also has experience doing this well. “During H1N1, that test came out quickly and was distributed,” Klapperich says. “I’m not clear what went wrong here.”

----
The idiot trump is what went wrong here in the US. I really beleive he has a company (that he has financial ibnterest in) creating the test kits.