Source: US Coronavirus News Mar 11, 2020 4 years, 9 months, 1 week, 5 days, 13 hours, 26 minutes ago
US Coronavirus Updates: As of Wednesday 11
th March 2020, 0630hrs , there are 986 confirmed Covid-19 cases in 36 out of 50 States In the US and a total of 31 deaths so far.
But is even more disturbing is that there could be more than 9,000 silent spreaders of the disease since January in the country and many healthcare facilities in the US have been misdiagnosing severe conditions of the disease among patients for the last two months as other forms of non-zoonotic coronavirus infected diseases and even as the influenza. New revelations are indicating that certain deaths in the last two months that were reported as due to pneumonia and influenza could have actually been due to the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes the deadly Covid-19 disease which can have long incubation periods.
The US CDC and NIH has on a whole failed the country and even worst the CDC management for the diagnostic criteria and also its management of test kits production has only accelerated the spread of the disease indirectly.
Contrary to the fact that America has superior healthcare facilities, its current system is not the lease prepared for what is coming in the next few weeks. As of today, the problem of diagnostic test kits has not been resolved with many States complaining of an acute shortage of diagnostic test kits.
Reports in the
Journal of the American Medical Association (
JAMA) on Monday by epidemiologists from Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University said the failings had contributed to the virus taking root in communities across the country.
As of Sunday, 8
th of March, only 1,707 Americans have managed to have been tested, according to Business Insider, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
South Korea, which announced its first case on the same day as the US, had tested more than 189,000 people, the publication added.
The researchers of the
JAMA report wrote that the only test initially authorized was one developed by the CDC.
The US CDC relied on the same technology as one authorized by the World Health Organization (WHO) and deployed around the world except that a fault meant the CDC kit was returning inconclusive results.
Only on the 29
th of February, the date of the first US death and more than a month after the first confirmed US case, that the Food and Drug Administration lifted a ban on state laboratories developing their own kits based on the WHO's tests.
The US CDC announced Monday it has testing capacity in 78 state and local public health labs, with 75,000 kits available nationwide and more by mid-March. However checks showed than less than 27,000 test kits was actually available for a populations of more than 327 million people.
The clueless President Donald Trump told a White House news conference, "When people need a test, they can get a test. When the professionals need to test more people they can get the tests."
His administration had initially promised to have one million kits in place by the end of last week but nothing mat
erialized.
Dr Michelle Mello of Stanford, a co-author of the report told
Thailand Medical News, "Adopting broader testing criteria and allowing use of a wider range of tests would have been helpful in identifying the first US cases and containing the spread,"
She added, "Manufacturing problems like the one that arose with CDC's test are always a risk, but the fact that CDC put all its eggs in that one basket made the manufacturing snafu highly consequential."
The US CDC was initially only testing people with known exposure, meaning a Californian patient on a ventilator was denied the test for five days, the patient's doctors said.
The diagnostic criteria were changed as a result of this case.
Dr Mello also pointed to several inaccuracies in White House communications on the epidemic from declaring that containment efforts were "close to airtight" to claiming a vaccine could be ready within three to four months.
She further added, "The public messaging from Washington about the seriousness of the problem has been neither consistent nor accurate, and I worry it may have led Americans to take fewer steps to prevent community transmission than we should have"
Many epidemiologists are anticipating a massive rise in sick cases in the US over the next few weeks due to the total incompetence of the CDC and health officials in the US.
For more on the
US coronavirus developing epidemic crisis, keep on checking at:
https://www.thailandmedical.news/articles/coronavirus
Note a new Covid-19 Global status panel will be in operations by tomorrow at:
https://thailandmedical.news/coronavirus-update/
Reference: Diagnostic Testing for the Novel Coronavirus
Joshua M. Sharfstein, MD1;
Scott J. Becker, MS2;
Michelle M. Mello, JD, PhD3
JAMA. Published online March 9, 2020. doi:10.1001/jama.2020.3864
