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[Naturegirl1999]

Also testing figures for the USA as of Feb 28 were that the USA has tested a whopping 459 whole people! Meanwhile, at that point, South Korea had conducted 65,000 tests, and it's reported that China has scaled up so they're capable of handling up to 1.5 million tests per week.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/03/02/035218/americas-coronavirus-testing-lags-far-behind-south-korea-and-china

Probably because the patient has to pay for it here.

I am an American and that sounds stupid. We have to pay for tests? Shouldnt taxes going to hospitals be the paying indirectly? I probably could have phrased that better

[MrRoboto75]

Also testing figures for the USA as of Feb 28 were that the USA has tested a whopping 459 whole people! Meanwhile, at that point, South Korea had conducted 65,000 tests, and it's reported that China has scaled up so they're capable of handling up to 1.5 million tests per week.

https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/03/02/035218/americas-coronavirus-testing-lags-far-behind-south-korea-and-china

Probably because the patient has to pay for it here.

I am an American and that sounds stupid. We have to pay for tests? Shouldnt taxes going to hospitals be the paying indirectly? I probably could have phrased that better

Because socialism is demonized irrationally in america, and apparently having a bloat of admin and middlemen somehow save you money.

[coalboat]

This is a natural disaster and each governments sound stupid in their own unique way.

[Reelya]

227 cases in US now. It probably won't be long before we hear the "fired for having coronavirus" stories.

[Cthulhu]

If people want to define socialism around Soviet Russia, I've got some bad news for them.  America is disaggregated Stalinism.  If you've ever been involved in any kind of director+ level business shit, especially the finance side, you know what I mean.

A fractal hierarchy of dudes in suits, metrics are the entire bureacracy's collective fever dream so they're simultaneously infinitely malleable and infinitely unassailable, no individual can step in and say "this is bullshit," abstractions leaking like sieves, bullshit magnifying its way up the corporate ladder like mercury in fish, so at the VP/three-letter level they're completely divorced from anything resembling reality and just drone strike you with random nonsense demands to justify their salary.  The American bureacracy is textbook Stalinism, metastasized from the state apparatus into basically every aspect of human life.

Governments are terrible at mostly everything (in theory I think a government should be better than anarchism at something like controlling a pandemic, but in practice...) but in the current framework government is a fixed quantity.  Corporations are an extension of the government and have all the same problems so taking functions away from the de jure state does not reduce the level of government, only move it around.  That's why ancaps are morons.

Weird situation right now where this post would've fit in the current line of discussion in the COVID thread and the Ameripol thread, but I'll leave it here.

[TamerVirus]

LA:Declares state of emergency because of Coronavirus
Also LA:Huge marathon with 27,000 people from across the world, that’s A-OK!

Lot of dumb decisions going on here in the USA

[Frumple]

On the whole our national response has been fucking stupid to the point it's also kneecapped any local attempts to be less stupid, yes, on top of some local stuff also being pretty stupid.

Like, I think I remember some TV talking head say they expect at least 40% of the country to get infected before this is relatively over, and at this point I can believe it

[Iduno]

I am an American and that sounds stupid. We have to pay for tests? Shouldnt taxes going to hospitals be the paying indirectly? I probably could have phrased that better

Why would the government want to pay thousands of dollars apiece for tests that they know don't work right?

I agree with you, though. Public health is a public concern, and should be dealt with as such. If it's enough of a concern to require everyone to have insurance, they should be providing it. It would save a massive amount in having to track whether or not everyone has insurance at any given time.

On the whole our national response has been fucking stupid to the point it's also kneecapped any local attempts to be less stupid, yes, on top of some local stuff also being pretty stupid.

Even as a blanket statement, I'd have a hard time disagreeing with this.

[Naturegirl1999]

I am an American and that sounds stupid. We have to pay for tests? Shouldnt taxes going to hospitals be the paying indirectly? I probably could have phrased that better

Why would the government want to pay thousands of dollars apiece for tests that they know don't work right?

I agree with you, though. Public health is a public concern, and should be dealt with as such. If it's enough of a concern to require everyone to have insurance, they should be providing it. It would save a massive amount in having to track whether or not everyone has insurance at any given time.

What? Why are we using tests that don't work?

[Reelya]

Google it.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/02/united-states-badly-bungled-coronavirus-testing-things-may-soon-improve

Speed is critical in the response to COVID-19. So why has the United States been so slow in its attempt to develop reliable diagnostic tests and use them widely?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has shipped testing kits to 57 countries. China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week; South Korea has tested 65,000 people so far. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in contrast, has done only 459 tests since the epidemic began. The rollout of a CDC-designed test kit to state and local labs has become a fiasco because it contained a faulty reagent. Labs around the country eager to test more suspected cases—and test them faster—have been unable to do so. No commercial or state labs have the approval to use their own tests.

America had to have their own tests different to everyone else's. I guess that using the foreign tests would have been humiliating or something. However they completely dropped the ball and sent out broken test kits.

USA has tested very few people. 12 death implies about 360 detectable cases. But some deaths may be being improperly classified as influenza deaths.

[Iduno]

It's the US, so it's probably best to assume equal parts incompetence and malice. The WHO tests are readily and cheaply available from dirty foreigners (as Reelya pointed out), and good ol' US ingenuity can easily do better for a mere 300x the price. The extra profit means extra good, so it got pushed through without all of those pesky quality checks.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

What I'm wondering about is just how effective the existing test is on top of this nonsense. I've seen several accounts now of wild swings between false negatives and false positives, mostly the former.

[ChairmanPoo]

I hope you are all stocking and freezing potatoes. As you know they're the only true known cure.

[TamerVirus]

But India says the urine and dung of the cow is the cure!

[ChairmanPoo]

No, it's frozen potato enema.

The fart of someone who recovered from coronavirus is an effective prophylactic, but they must be fresh farts.