XPost: alt.guitar.amps
From: NoEmail@void.net

#WuHanDon Lied
Ameicans Died


Coronavirus: German company developed 1.4m tests in six weeks while US production stalled

Government was slow to work with private companies on making tests, even
as its efforts were shown to be failing

The founder of a small Berlin-based company, the ponytailed 54-year-old
first raced to help German researchers come up with a diagnostic test
and then spurred his company to produce more than 1.4 million tests for
the World Health Organisation (WHO) by the end of February.

By contrast, over the same critical period, US efforts to distribute
tests ground nearly to a halt, and the country’s inability to produce
them left public health officials with limited means to determine where
and how fast the virus was spreading. From mid-January until 28
February, fewer than 4,000 tests from the US Centres for Disease Control
and Prevention (CDC) were used out of more 160,000 produced.

The United States’ struggles, in Mr Landt’s view, stemmed from the fact
the country took too long to use private companies to develop the tests.
The coronavirus pandemic was too big and moving too fast for the CDC to
develop its own tests in time, he said.

Thomas Frieden, an infectious disease physician who served as CDC
director under Barack Obama, called on Sunday for an “independent group”
to investigate what went wrong with the CDC’s testing process. He said
that in the past, the CDC moved quickly to produce tests for diseases
such as H1N1, aka swine flu.

“We were able to get test kits out fast,” Mr Frieden said on CNN. “Something went wrong here. We have to find out why so we can prevent
that in the future.”

Mr Frieden said the agency has been muzzled under Donald Trump and
despite the multitude of problems with the rollout of testing, “the CDC
is still the greatest public health institution in the world”.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)