The Testing Debacle

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I don't like Trump

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I appreciate your being forthright about this.

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Trumps idiocy exacerbated it a bit

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You're basing this on nothing, with all due respect.

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he didn't wield his bully pulpit well to cut a shite load of red tape. There is some 20/20 hindsight with that though.

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Again, I greatly respect your self-awareness on this issue - this is a sign of a potential for growth.

Trump (and WHO, CDC, NIH, etc.) was flying blind due to Red China's deliberate disinformation campaign and opaque security measures. But, his instincts were good, overall. Forget what he said on twitter, his actions kept this from being a much worse deal for us as a nation.

CDC (correctly) didn't trust the WHO and other international testing protocol. The decision to go forward with their own test was the right (or at least a reasonable) call at the time. Then they bungled the initial execution. Trump (and the team, that includes his rock star decision to recall Birx) quickly realized the obsolete CDC testing protocol model wasn't going to work. So, Trump, by sheer force of will mobilized private industry against this pandemic.

Something those policy wonks and most past Presidents raised by this same swamp of bureaucracy and red tape wouldn't have been able to do.

He deserves credit for functioning as the elite level executive he is. Identify risks/opportunities, figure out the chokepoints in productivity and throughput and elevate performance channels. He had to quickly come up to speed on all of this and has outperformed everyone's expectations.

Again - the key to Trump is focus on what he does NOT what he says. His performance deserves an A or A- grade and has literally saved American lives by the hundreds of thousands.

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I don't like Trump, and feel dirty if I defend him

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When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail

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Trumps idiocy exacerbated it a bit


You're basing this on nothing, with all due respect.

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I based that wording on the fact that liberals tend to read things if they see words like idiocy in the same sentence with Trump.

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CDC (correctly) didn't trust the WHO and other international testing protocol. The decision to go forward with their own test was the right (or at least a reasonable) call at the time.

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I don't believe WHO ever offered. That was one of the first media myths. CDC was on it from the start.

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He deserves credit for functioning as the elite level executive he is. Identify risks/opportunities, figure out the chokepoints in productivity and throughput and elevate performance channels. He had to quickly come up to speed on all of this and has outperformed everyone's expectations.

Again - the key to Trump is focus on what he does NOT what he says. His performance deserves an A or A- grade and has literally saved American lives by the hundreds of thousands.

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I disagree with some minor points, but overall a nice rendition of events from the Right POV.

Hope you don't mind if I "borrow" that to shove down a couple libs throats.

Could you explain how in this country testing is the silver bullet that it's claimed to be? I am comfortable in my understanding of how testing made such a difference in places like China, S Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. In those countries/locations, the program is basically this: if you test positive, the government discloses your identity and address to the general public. From there, repugnant human nature takes over....you're shunned by your neighbors and fellow townspeople, and good luck if you appear to be acting in a hazardous way by going anywhere near the general public. You'd likely end up in a hospital for something even worse than the virus itself, at the hands of your local peers.

Oh, and the government also tracks down with phone gps technology any associates, friends, family and anyone else identifiable who you've been in contact with, and all those people are forced into an isolation regimen as well. All of this borne of that simple test result. And yes, it has made a significant difference in those countries....because they don't play when it comes to social isolation.

Now, that's how testing has made a significantly measurable difference in those countries. But what role does the magical test play in producing similar measurable difference in THIS country??

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Everybody is using current data NOW.

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A fascinating part of this is how fast it all changes. The data we see NOW is obsolete the moment our brains register it.

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You can be anti-Trump all you want but the fact is that the US reacted to available info and actually made chicken salad out of the original chicken shite.

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I'm not anti-Trump, I voted for him before, will vote for him again. But I won't be a sycophant that ignores his shortcomings. And you don't have to like someone to vote for them. America will plow through this not because of Trump or "in spite of" Trump, rather because it is simply what America does.

Back to the original post, this bat-ackwards virus was very tame. If something comes along that is hardcore, like a 30 CFR, with the current FUBAR bureaucracy in place, by the time decisions are made, we will all be obsolete.

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You are using current data.

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Finally you are right about something. You forget that the early testing methods returned lots of false positives. This would have done nothing but put the public into a bigger illogical hysteria than it was already going into.

This whole thing is semi interesting.

Some studies are demonstrating that the actual number of infected people are of by a factor of 30 to 80. Am Iceland study suggested that America finds less than 2 percent of infected people.

That means the amount of assumptions spread going on here boggles the mind.

And if we are indeed missing that amount, testing isn't the answer. Because you can't test 300 million people every couple of days to catch all the asymptomatic people.

Masks, washing hands, keeping a little bit of distance all are important. This is what the other countries do well. Temperature checks, because you likely shed more virus when you are symptomatic.

This is useful to spread out the infections. It isn't until this thing reached a critical mass that it becomes a problem. If you let it smolder in the background you are fine. Just be aware that you get open flamer you gotta stamp down hard.

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For me, I'll do my part, stay at home sipping JD while it lasts,

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But in the event of testing positive.....I would submit that the level of disciplined self isolation necessary to be 100% successful in not being a spreader is serious business. So serious that the threat of significant penalty or punishment in the event of failing to 100% abide is made crystal clear in those other countries.

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hope the rest of the world isn't as cynical as I am

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Glad to meet a fellow super cynic. It's a blessing and a curse. But mostly a curse.

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When the antibody test is deployed in mass, then we are good

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I agree, this could lead to some interesting potential.

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The US is catching up, [/quote
The US is a leader. It has no one to catch.

[quote]was a fully qualified failure early on

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Disagree. People who think, "oh, a novel infection exists and you don't have unlimited texting within a week of the first case" don't know how things work. It isn't their fault. Their perception of reality is just bad, mostly from not dealing with this stuff daily.

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It is important to assign blame

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Exactly what good does that do?

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more important to find out why

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See above. It can be summed up as "bad shite happens sometimes" and is a reality of life.

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This New Yorker article does an outstanding job of describing the bureaucratic nightmare that was the root cause

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Do you want:
1) good
2) fast
3) cheap
You get one up front and can generally expand to 2 within a few months. All 3 is not a fast process.
As often as the FDA sucks, they really haven't stood in the way during this one too much from what I've gathered.

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But WHY our testing failed IMO falls largely on the systemic inefficiencies of very large bureaucracies. Trumps idiocy exacerbated it a bit, and he didn't wield his bully pulpit well to cut a shite load of red tape. There is some 20/20

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My perception is the opposite. He probably got things sped along about as quickly as possible. He's deferring much to the states. There's only so much red tape to be cut. Machines don't kick up themselves overnight.

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Everything the bureaucracy did was intended to protect the public health, but in reality it harmed public health. Finding a way to streamline bureaucracy seems like a good place to to focus our energies

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Plenty of layers could be pulled out without much harm.

But do you want a healthcare system and government designed to respond to 99.999% of the anticipated problems or a 1 in 100 year event?

I wouldn't want a government designed to deal with the problems we are facing today on a daily basis. That would be so many extra offices and positions.

Bad shite will always happen.


The response has been generally good. There's room for improvement, always. Assigning blame is wasted energy. Critiquing specific responses could be beneficial if done through the appropriate channels (spreading locally, calling representatives, etc). A government that has responses to health pandemics in place is a government with too many people being paid to think about too many things that won't happen.

Here's to hoping that $100K of today's retirement dollars is worth more than $10K in 2060 dollars.