Testing blunders crippled US response as coronavirus spread

WASHINGTON — A series of missteps at the nation’s top public health agency caused a critical shortage of reliable laboratory tests for the coronavirus, hobbling the federal response as the pandemic spread across the country like wildfire, an Associated Press review found. President Donald Trump assured Americans early this month that the COVID-19 test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is “perfect” and that “anyone who wants a test can get a test.” But more than two months after the first U.S. case of the new disease was confirmed, many people still cannot get tested. “Basically, they took this as business as usual.. And that’s because the messaging from the White House was ‘this is not a big deal, this is no worse than the flu.’ So that message basically created no sense of urgency within the FDA or the CDC to fix it.” Even as private labs have been cleared by government regulators to process tens of thousands of additional tests in the last two weeks, experts warn that the nation is still falling well short of enough testing capacity to keep ahead of the highly contagious virus. However, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said the CDC’s system wasn’t designed to test for and track a widespread outbreak, which he characterized as “a failing.” In interviews with the AP, two federal health officials with direct knowledge of the situation said CDC experts don’t know why many of the agency’s test kits failed to reliably detect the virus. “It’s one person coming in from China.. It’s going to be just fine.” With limited capacity at the CDC lab in Atlanta, the agency placed strict criteria on who could be tested: people with fevers, coughing or difficulty breathing who had also visited Wuhan within the preceding two weeks or who had close contact with someone already confirmed or under investigation for having the virus.