Posted on 07/12/2020 11:39:40 AM PDT by NoLibZone
The disease investigators arrived at the apartment in street clothes, carrying their gowns, gloves and face shields in Whole Foods bags. They didn’t knock on the door.
Instead, they called the resident — a man in his 50s, then California’s first known coronavirus case — by phone. When he answered, he was instructed to move to the farthest corner of the apartment so the team could go inside and suit up. The pileup of samples left the county’s testing infrastructure bottlenecked and on the brink of collapse. A county memo asked hospitals to turn away any suspected coronavirus patient with mild symptoms — without a test and without reporting the case. Other counties were worse off. One in four of the state’s public health laboratories closed entirely in recent years, and there remained less than one public health lab per million state residents. Many reported an annual equipment budget of zero dollars or were under review for closure — until couriers began arriving with patient swabs and hand-scribbled test requests. They had come to the apartment building in Orange County to make sure the man was where he promised to be — and that he was isolating there, completely alone.
“First case. New virus. We weren’t going to take people’s word for it,” recalled the county’s medical director of communicable disease control, Dr. Matthew Zahn, who oversaw the operation. But as the latter scenario played out, California found itself unprepared, overwhelmed and constantly lagging, a Los Angeles Times investigation has found. Those early failures left California far behind in the fight against the coronavirus, and it has struggled to keep up — even as cases surge today.
I
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
They lacked the capacity to analyze the test kits.
They must restrict immigration until they have sufficient medical resources to deal with their population.
Just another day in the life a of a complete failure
The protocol was meant to fail. If not by design, then by implementation.
“I tried, and I tried, and I tried, I just cuddent do it!”
Who do they think they are, Tweetie Bird?
California is testing so much now that the new cases per day are at the level of New York at the height of the epidemic.
But the deaths are hardly increasing at all, unlike earlier in New York where the case curve was paralleled by the death curve with a week lag.
This latter is expected. The California data now shows the increase in cases is due to huge increases of tests, or conceivably but less likely, the virus being hugely less pathogenic.
Why do I think there was money in the budget that went down a rabbit hole?
Why wait until inside the apartment to suit up?
I think 3 to 4 million people in New York had caught the virus.
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