No. The US is heavily bureaucratic and fracture country when it comes to healthcare. In both culture and law it's built for slow bureaucratic response when it comes to anything medical. That's not easily changed. It's not agile like Korea and it lacked the hard experience of SARS that Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had to know early what had to be done. There were no experts anywhere who'd dealt with anything like this before; it wasn't part of the US experience.

You don't think a socialized medical system in a much smaller country with a completely centralized government having total control (no real states) will have huge natural advantages over the US? Even now Trump has no power to lock down states without 50 governors agreeing. Has no power to set testing rules for hospitals. Etc. It's a highly fractured and decentralized country.

Verneer, posted in this very thread that his wife got a test yesterday and that the results would take ten days. There should be a governement mandate to get results faster. The testing failure is well documented.

Look buddy, you're a smart guy, but your disingenuousness in the way you debate makes it pointless to discuss politics with you. I've had you on ignore for years because of it. I took you off recently because you've had some very good analysis on this virus. We've basically been in lock step.

But when politics and Trump comes up, you go haywire. If you want to wash away objectively constructive criticism of an objectively awful leader in a time of crisis, by calling it "trump derangement syndrome", that's your perogative, but it's intellectually lazy. This laziness is surprising coming from someone who is obviously intelligent.

We all have blinds spots though.

[citation needed] on didn't listen to. All the reports are that he did listen to them. The experts sucked at this, but there is no alternative to them when putting together a task force (or listening to them unless you're insane).

What precisely should have been done differently?
What do you mean the tests never happened? You seem ignorant of the entire timelines here. Listen to Fauci or something, please, you have no clue about anything and are just wasting everyone's time.

I didn't' say it was only. I was making the point that no one was taking this seriously even as their university closed for social distancing. These people don't listen to Fox News, yet they didn't take it seriously.

Yes, and I made utter incompetent fools like you a lot of money by analyzing this whole event correctly. You're welcome.

Tooth ****s so hard itt and bfi that i cannot allow my wife to read any of this for the off chance one of his money shot posts impregnates her. Imagine raising a toothbaby, little mofo teaches himself trig in the crib using geometry from the fourth dimension of the universe.

The answer is literally right there in my post:
The tests aren't taking 10 days. One test that their particular provider chose of their own free will is taking 10 days for that provider to send and return. That's how healthcare works in the US - it's a big fractured mess where everyone chooses their own provider and couriering and costs. Yet you're extrapolating this one post as suggesting that all these tests are taking 10 days and that this is Trump's fault. This is just you a) having zero clue what you're talking about or familiarity with anything at all here and b) just generally being silly
I don't accept your premises, and look at where the evidence leads. You call this being disingenuous. You're highly emotional and convinced Trump is a moron and all your analysis is colored by that. That's not a rational starting point.

This has gone the same way in every single country except the SARS ones and some far right Eastern European ones.

1. Complacency/little or no action
2. First cases found, usually when someone gets serious in a hospital. Very slow ramp on contact tracing and testing
3. Lockdown of an area when the case load becomes known, usually when hospitals are seeing an explosion in serious cases
4. Lockdown of the entire country when the hospitals start going truly crazy and testing shows large infections.

This is a highly incompetent response. It has been the response of every country. Your takeaway is that Trump is uniquely incompetent despite it going just like every other country in the US, and actually better in some ways. That's not following where the evidence leads, that's letting your hate do your thinking.

I think the most comical response so far is from the UK, where their experts decided (based on faulty models) that the best thing to do was to let it go unconstrained through their entire population to make people immune. Before panicking and locking things down about 10 days later.

You made this an issue, I was talking about blame and how and why the experts did so badly on this. Leaders of countries (including Trump) come in at about 6th in the list of people to blame. None of them know virology. There's no way they all ignored their experts. It's quite clear the experts got this wrong everywhere, with a nice helping hand from Chinese lies/blocking foreign observers and the WHO incompetence.
You have provided precisely zero objective constructive criticism. You have no facts and blame Trump for everything when 100 countries with no Trump are in the exact same position. That's objectively pure irrationality on your part.
I don't have a blind spot here. I only care about where the evidence leads and the evidence leads to the conclusion that Trump's response was well ahead of the pack early and not meaningfully different from any other leader later, so claiming he's uniquely incompetent/bad/this is his fault alone given this is exactly Trump derangement syndrome on your part.

You can certainly dislike him for the messaging/trying to put a positive spin on this/appearing to try to downplay it. But the fact is that 60% of Americans approve of his handling of coronavirus - some of those at the same time disapprove of Trump generally. I think what you think is objective is just like, your opinion man.

This is nowhere close to true. The US was in 3rd or 4th place, eleven days ago, despite being one of the later countries to institute mass testing. I can't find any current data, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're #2 by now. If there is one thing true about America and Americans, when **** needs to get done, they get it done.

Even if this was true, which it's not, is that Trumps fault? Is everything bad Trumps fault, and everything good unrelated to him? Clearly he has done some good things, like most leaders around the world have. No leader has come close to the appropriate response, but at least Trump stopped flights from China in January, only to be met with infantile shrieks of racism from Democrats. Flights from China were still coming into Canada up until a week ago. Now Democrats are blaming Trump for not acting sooner. Have some goddamn integrity, would you?

It's pretty clear you're biased on this.

US is obviously testing far more than anyone. Contrary to "less than any country" the US is actually testing more than any country in total volume and delta volume (WorldBoFree has it completely backward). As for the backlogs, it's a really complex problem. No one is doing testing at the scale the US is, not even close. The CDC failed to do it at even a small scale (they screwed up both the tests and the scaling of them). The mass of private labs are running into backlogs now. It's just not that easy to scale to millions of new tests quickly. This is a good summary:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...crisis/609193/

Fauci and others claim they've approved 15 minutes tests now. Still, only 50K can be made a week. Once that and others ramp well enough it should finally fix the problem.

"I saw it on CNN"

That's a fantastic ****ing argument.

This is impressive as hell. From 100k to 1M tests in ~10 days. Unbelievable, actually. Goes to show the relative ubermensch qualities of the American system, as well as a pretty strong indirect argument for privatization in general.

This crisis should be a pretty strong dose of reality and indictment against Berniebros/socialists, but it won't be.

Private Labs Are Fueling a New Coronavirus Testing Crisis

The "Berniebro" Social Democracies in Germany and Austria are still at roughly 2x the tests performed in the US per capita, fwiw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_testing

US 3.4k/mio
Ger/AUT 5.8k/mio

This won't age well.

I was merely quoting today's stats. But if you want to talk about the future, I'm also pretty confident that the "socialist" healthcare systems in both countries are better prepared for the Corona peak than USA#1.

anitbody tests would make a huge difference, if immunity lasts for several months or more. i found a couple articles on the current progress: wapo mar 31 and huffinton mar 31

both articles are pretty poorly written, just a collection of disjointed facts that don't make any connections and don't really explain the situation in a meaningful, useful way.

you read this and it makes it sound like a solution is a long way off.

then you read this and makes it sound like we already have a solution here and now that can and should be scaled up. if we can do 8,000 tests in one little town, let's get all the labs working on this and crank out 80 million tests by may 1.

so there's already a test in telluride. germany is working on a test. the huffpost article details the antibody test in the uk. why are different labs all working on the same problem? is the telluride test just flawed, with lots of room for improvement? i'd think that once there was one good test, all labs would stop designing their own and we'd just manufacture a ****ton of the good tests.

same question goes for the antigen test as well, actually. we do some places have tests that give results in 10 minutes, and other places are taking several days for their results?

Who do you think provides these tests to Germany/Austria? All these resources are developed by private companies.

I was surprised at this (and maybe they are high-balling), but we got the test through the official county testing site (at a major college town):



Anyone else that gets tested in our area should expect the same results. Our county is not in a major hotspot, so maybe they are not a priority. My whole point of posting that was to show how some areas are really lacking in infrastructure to quickly analyze and react.

Sure, there is plenty of private medical research and production going on in both these countries and I'm not at all advocating against that. I think you are misinterpreting my post.

@Wittgenheiny claimed that this crisis should be a wakeup call for people advocating for Bernie style healthcare, and GER/AUT both have relatively typical European healthcare systems. One interesting thing about this situation is that we'll get to see how the different systems cope with a crisis. I honestly hope the US system handles this well, but I really don't expect to see outcomes that would justify spending twice the percentage of GDP on the healthcare sector compared to systems in GER/AUT.

Yeah, but to be fair US healthcare is heavily distorted and doesn't even come close to resembling a free market.

The main problem of US healthcare isn't spending too little. It's the inefficiency created by fragmentation and misguided focus on profit for the selected few above all.

Lot of hype around these antibody tests as an eagerly awaited panacea that will help get everything back to normal again, so wanted to keyboard mash some thoughts. Two main points of serology testing to my mind: (1) Serosurveys, (2) Population testing to support economic restart and greenlighting immune people to go back to work

(2) will take longer and be more gradual to play out given usual constraints with going from zero to enormous population level production rampup of the relevant antigens (think of it like manufacturing a complex biologic). I dont know timelines, maybe 6-12months before it starts in earnest for general pop as a total guess (though earlier for healthcare workers)

(1) will be more immediate - first random sampled reads to answer the key unknown question of 'what proportion of cases were undetected and what's the true proportion of the population that is now no longer susceptible having already had it'.

If we find something like 30% or more of the population already have it and there's massive asymptomatic cases, with IFR very low (as per speculation in Oxford study) then it's great news as it's easy to restart economy quickly and not sweat keeping R<1 too much, can get to herd immunity sooner without anything getting out of control on ICU capacity or number of deaths especially as that capacity is rapidly being added

If we find there's low asymptomatic cases and we're actually catching a good % of the cases, this thing is just deadly (e.g. IFR>1.5%) and hasn't yet even reached a lot of the population despite clearly being very virulent then it's the worst case and public health response will involve ongoing post lockdown restrictions, potential further adaptive on/off lockdowns and more societal behaviour change out of rational fear. In this case we just have to keep R<1 by hook or crook until we bridge to vaccine, economy stays depressed longer, and there won't even be that many people out there we can greenlight back to work with serology tests.

so bottom line is while everyone's looking to these serology tests as one driver of economy and markets having a relief rally, before that happens it first reveals an important unknown that may end up being a big negative datapoint.

The US has the same amount of people listed in serious/critical condition as Spain, France and Italy. Right now it is reporting about the same amount of deaths as Italy and Spain and about twice as many as France. So it stands to reason that it shouldn't see a big increase in deaths from this over the next week unless the amount of serious/critical cases increase as well or unless there is a problem with the data being inputted.

My gut feeling is that the different parameters being used to classify these deaths is so random that the data we are seeing is essentially useless. It took three years for the CDC to figure out how many people died from H1N1, and even then the estimates were pretty wide.

Also, you are using a pretty wide qualifier. If they double in a week, that is a pretty far cry from doubling in two weeks.

The politics debates ITT wildly reduce its utility. I ask that everyone involved just stop. It's not that hard to do, and each of you know when you're doing it.

Hundreds of thousands are available. We're testing at 100k a day now and still ramping up. Some errors (such as finding weak links, possibly like Quest) are inevitable when you are scaling so quickly.

The biggest problem frankly is with the messaging from the White House. The private sector is in fact testing 100k+ a day. What the White House failed to tell people, and Cuomo is doing way better at letting people know, is that's not enough for everyone and they still need to prioritize.

We're probably looking at something pretty close to linear growth in terms of lab testing capacity. The next big spike in testing will come from on-site and at-home testing kits that will be available in the coming weeks and then months.

How long do you guys think it will take the US to get to 1M tests per day?

I believe thats the threshold number where politicians and governors decide to open things up. Purely a guess though. US needs at least another 30 days to get to 1M tests per day in production / testing sites / and lab turnout.

I think that will be at least 1 month out, probably 2. It looks like LabCorp/Quest+others picked off the low hanging fruits already and we now are waiting for machines to expand capacity. That's happening gradually but we should expect lab capacity to expand much more slowly now.

To get to 1 million a day quickly requires on-site and probably at least some at-home testing. The tech is available and it's a matter of approval (happening now), production (already happening with some), and just scaling. Stuff like setting up booths and tents (Seoul style) to test en masse on-site is probably coming sometime late April (if not, it means we're still not at Apex by mid April and that would be really really bad).