Posted on 03/08/2020 7:42:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Is there or is there not a shortage of kits to test for the coronavirus? That the question even has to be asked does not reflect well on the administration's response to the crisis.
And yet, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told ABC News on Friday there was no shortage, contradicting the White House and health professionals across the country.
“There is no testing kit shortage, nor has there ever been,” Azar said on ABC News Friday. “We will have by the end of this weekend over 1.2 million tests around America in public health labs as well as in private and commercial labs, and that is scaling up by the millions, ramping up rapidly.”
Vice President Mike Pence told the media on Thursday that the U.S. would come up short of a million test kits distributed by the end of the week.
Vice President Mike Pence, who is leading the federal government's coronavirus response, made the acknowledgment Thursday while visiting a factory in Minnesota, the BBC reported.
"We don't have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward," he said.
The BBC said that later, speaking in Washington, Pence added: "We still have a ways to go to ensure that tests are available."
The BBC said Pence instead moved the goal to next week, when he predicted kits for 1.2 million people would be available.
Azar is correct when he says that manufacture of test kits is "ramping up rapidly." Pence says that 4 million kits will be shipped by the end of next week.
Americans are going to need them.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
Basically, yeah.
I guess it can help you figure out which cities to quarantine first—but you have to be ready to go there or there is no point.
In their panic people do not understand how doctors use tests. The tests are administered based on a lab order that must be authorized by a doctor. Doctors only use tests to confirm a diagnosis not to calm panicked patients who want to be tested.
If you have a temperature over 100.4, a wet cough that can be detected by auscultation, and other indications of something other than a standard cold or flu you would be given a COVID-19 test. This is how medicine works. It would be a total waste of the tests to just administer them to every person that was nervous. It would also create a shortage of tests for people that need to have their diagnosis confirmed.
The press is intentionally fanning panic and undermining the jobs of the medical professionals by implying that the problem is out of control because everyone can just buy a test kit at CVS and self diagnose an illness for which they have no symptoms.
The test kits were initially restricted in order to direct the limited supply to cases of the clearest medical need and to calibrate the testing protocol. Whether there is a shortage depends on how one defines official eligibility for testing versus the much larger public demand if there are no restrictions and the test has been proven reliable. The press obscures this point in order to create confusion.
“Is there or is there not a shortage of kits to test for the coronavirus?”
Of course there is. Designing the kits and making milions of them and distributing them all over the country can not happen in a month.
900,000 only covers 75,000 patients? 12 test per patient? This is where messaging needs to be more clear.
What do the detractors want? Trump and the people he has chosen have been working as hard as they can. To date they’ve created 1.4 million test kits and more to come.
You should be asking the contrarian governors why they have not been cooperating with the administration. Especially Washington St. Calif and New York.
Just look how quickly the COVID-19 spread in New York state. Where was Cuomo and why was he sitting on his hands when the Lawyer was diagnosed?
Their stories are straight. The regulations prevented commercial companies from making kits for doc offices. Trump changed that. Now Quest and LabPro are producing like mad. Before tests had to be sent to CDC or state public health lab... they lacked capacity.
With the current ramp up tjis problem has been solved
China was testing with a test that gave a thirty percent false negative. That ain’t useful. The US test is ninety eight percent accurate. That is useful
Stanford [University] Medicine COVID-19 test now in use
On Feb. 29, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it was relaxing the restrictions for the use of diagnostic tests for SARS-CoV-2 developed by laboratories in the United States that meet the certification guidelines for high-complexity testing. The new policy allows these laboratories to begin using in-house developed clinical tests for the virus before obtaining the agency’s approval through an emergency use authorization. The FDA noted that “Rapid detection of COVID-19 cases in the United States requires wide availability of diagnostic testing to control the emergence of this rapidly spreading, severe illness.” Laboratories developing their own tests are expected to apply for emergency use authorization from the FDA within 15 days.Stanford got their in-house approved and in production already. This is the way to do it. The Stanford test is expected to deliver results within 12-24 hours.
How are you going to insert the sampling tip into your lung bronchi to get your lower respiratory sample?
Cough?
- * unless noted otherwise, these figures are EOD 03/07.
These numbers include Mainland China and All Others globally
This format allows you to see trends. I'll continue to use it.
Today's figures will not appear here, because we are not at the
end of the day yet, and all other figures are EOD figures.
Declared Cases
. Declared Deceased
. . Declared Recovered
. . . Declared Resolved
Date . . . . Cases Remining Active
-----------------------------------------------------------------
03/03 93,160 3,198 50,690 53,888 39,272
03/04 95,425 3,286 53,399 56,685 38,740
03/05 98,387 3,383 55,441 58,824 39,563
03/06 102,188 3,491 57,389 60,880 41,308
03/07 106,165 3,977 59,965 63,559 42,606
It's not that easy to spot the changes in daily growth.03/03: 2,223 03/04: 2,265 03/05: 2,962 03/06: 3,801 03/07: 3,977That's a rather prounounced growth rate. These are just the declared cases
The last column there shows the numbers of active cases. You will note how
they were dropping, then started increasing again. Here are the last five days
drop & then growth numbers.
03/03: -494 03/04: -532 03/05: 823 03/06: 1,745 03/07: 1,298Resolved cases are still helping to soften the massive numbers of new cases
We are seeing record breaking day to day large numbers. We had one spell where
the cases were larger for a day or two, but those were special circumstance
numbers. There was a reclassification in China, that saw over 15,000 cases
dumped into the list on one day. The following days was also abnormally high
Other than those two days, we've not see days where we approached 4,000 new
cases per day. As of 19:33 today, we are already at 3,869 cases.
As predicted, the mortality rate that went as low as 5.65% on the 27th, has now
begun to climb again. As of 19:33 it is running at 5.81%, but later tonight that
may be adjusted a bit, up or down. Generally this time of the day it's down
but things are too hectic to predict.
As predicted, the numbers of active cases of COVID-19 outside China, became larger
than the active cases inside China. At 19:03 the numbers of cases outside China
make up 56.99% of all cases globally. At that time there were 44,292 active
cases.
Globally we have held our own with regard to how many cases have been resolved.
The figure stands at 59,802%. I expected to see that recede more. We are still
very close to seeing 60% of all global cases declared resolved.
These numbers address the cases outside of Mainland China.
I will provide the same format for the numbers outside Mainland China.
Declared Cases
. Declared Deceased
. . Declared Recovered
. . . Declared Resolved
Date . . . . Cases Remining Active
-----------------------------------------------------------------
03/03 12,890 217 837 1,054 11,836
03/04 15,015 279 1,222 1,501 13,514
03/05 17,832 341 1,685 2,026 15,806
03/06 21,537 421 1,986 2,407 19,130
03/07 25,470 497 2,871 3,368 22,102
As you can see, these numbers can easily double or more every five days. As newYou can study the progression of any category you like.
Lets talk about the United States for a minute. I addressed the issue of the
U. S. catching fire several days ago. There was reason for concern, because two
back to back days saw 46.54 & 45.06 growth. That has dropped back to around
26-28%, but that isn't good either, to be honest. Lets hope things cool off.
The current mortality rate of deceased / deceased + recovered is too high to
take much meaning from. I've seen 14-17% figures, but those are not even in
the same ball park as what the final rate will be.
You can still review them if you access my database. That database has full
figures up until the last report at 19:33 this evening.
There are now 109 nations declaring cases within their borders. 1+
Three nations of the 109 nations or entities outside of Mainland China still
account for over 73% of all active cases outside China at this time. They
are slipping a little, but there is a lot of competition out there. Still
The next tier goes down to the 1,000 - 1,200 level. Those were the EOD
figures for 03/07.
7,134 28.01% South Korea
5,883 22.04% Italy
5,823 23.10% Iran
73.15% of all cases ourside of China...
These are clearly three break-out naitons.
I have a new section that addresses only the cases in the United States.
I have a new metric that explains how many people there are to one case in
each of these entities: Globally, Mainland China, Outside China, and inside
the United States. There is one person in every so many people in each of these entities.
Globally : 175,665 Mainland China: 77,852 Outside China : 308,248 The U. S. A. : 637,838All data below sourced from Johns Hopkins University: LINK
I have been downloading three to five reports per day since 01/27. I have then
worked up numbers that should give a very good representation of numbers that have
been provided to the public via that site.
In my spreadsheet linked below, you'll find global numbers including China. You will
find a separate section addressing just the Outside China figures. Then there is now
also a section with just the United States stats in there. There are also a lot of
special stats broken out for you to browse. The history of 109 nations and their
from day one of their reporting.
You're welcome to it.
COVID-19 Spreadsheet using JHU data
I'd like to apologize to those who may have been accessing my XLS version.
Due to the numbers of nations I am now tracking, the XLS version cannot support
the width of the file I have created. I can no longer provide it without major work.
If anyone wants that version, let me know and I'll see what I can do.
The CDC 2019 novel coronavirus test is intended for use with upper and lower respiratory specimens collected from people who meet CDC criteria for 2019-nCoV testing.
Is there or is there not a shortage of kits to test for the coronavirus?
To test an actual suspected infected person? There have been plenty of tests.
To test those who have been in close contact with confirmed infected people? There have been plenty of tests.
To test anyone the confirmed infected person may have exposed? Depends on whether they went to the houses of a few neighbors, or went through Grand Central.
To test everyone who presents with flu-like symptoms twice, so as to avoid false results? Absolutely not.
To randomly test the populace? Not even close.
To exhaustively test everyone out there? There never will be enough, and no one intends for there to be enough.
Fauci said this morning that there had been a “glitch” with the CDC’s test kits and so they got behind from that and there was some catching up for them to do now.
Was it merely incompetence or intentional sabotage that got the disease too thoroughly spread here now to stop?
Azar is an old pharma exec who is demonstrating that he will cough up any lie he wants on this.
The requirements from CDC make testing difficult to obtain. Ridiculous. I don’t blame the politicians, I blame the unelected bureaucrats at the CDC.
The declaration of an emergency Jan 31 brought more powers to bear, but also invoked new rules. The Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL) had to figure out and then submit a request to the FDA to get around these rules (which the CDC wasn’t allowed to bypass) which didn’t normally exist, which wasn’t actually done until Feb 24. The APHL finally asked the FDA, and the FDA agreed to ignore the rules.
In principle, many hospital and academic labs around the country have the capability to carry out tests themselves. The PCR reaction uses so-called primers, short stretches of DNA, to find viral sequences. The CDC website posts the primers used in its test, and WHO publicly catalogs other primers and protocols, too. Well-equipped state or local labs can use these—or come up with their own—to produce what are known as a “laboratory-developed tests” for in-house use.
But at the moment, they’re not allowed to do that without FDA approval. When the United States declared the outbreak a public health emergency on 31 January, a bureaucratic process kicked in that requires FDA’s “emergency use approval” for any tests. “The declaration of a public health emergency did exactly what it shouldn’t have. It limited the diagnostic capacity of this country,” Mina says. “It’s insane.”
On 24 February, APHL asked FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn for “enforcement discretion” to sidestep the emergency process and allow APHL members labs to use their own tests. On 26 February, Hahn replied that the CDC test could be modified to use just the primers that specifically detect SARS-CoV-2, essentially ignoring the faulty portion of the kits. FDA, in other words, would look the other way to make more widespread testing possible.
How are you going to insert the sampling tip into your lung bronchi to get your lower respiratory sample?
Labs will undoubtedly run control samples with each PCR run, but it's still not foolproof with regards false positives. Plus, this virus is a RNA virus, and thus testing will require a reverse transcription step - which is another potential exposure to error.
You ask the President and you get one answer. You ask Azar and you get a different answer. You ask Pence and you get a third answer. There needs to be one story and if the President wants to be the one putting the word out then the rest of the administration shouldn’t be contradicting him.
Actually I’d put it the other way around. Trump put together this task force and put Pence in charge of the messaging. If Trump wants them to do their jobs, then he shouldn’t be contradicting them.
And I don't disagree with that either, though Trump has never been one not to voice his opinion on anything. The important thing is a single, consistent message should be coming out regardless of who is delivering it.
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