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Failure on Covid-19 Testing in the USA

Posted on 14th March 2020

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Show all posts in this thread (Covid-19).

This is a copy of a post made in another thread (Medicine and Health).

I am getting thoroughly tired of hearing President Trump and his lies about how Covid-19 (the coronavirus) is "under control" in the US. The facts do not support his position.

In this article on the BBC, Dr. Anthony Fauci, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is reported as saying that "The testing system for coronavirus in the US is currently failing". The numbers support his statement.

For example, this report from the Daily Mail, from the 10th of March, explains that 8,554 Americans have been tested for coronavirus (but the CDC director says there isn't [sic] enough staff to keep up). Of those 8,554 (and I am sure that in the 4 days since then, the number tested has increased, but I have to pick some baseline), there are 795 confirmed cases of Covid-19, that is around 10% of those tested are infected!

To put those numbers in perspective, the US population is around 330 million. If we simply extrapolate, that would mean around 30 million infected Americans! Clearly that number is an overestimate, because testing has so far been focused on contacts of infected people, and in areas where there are higher numbers of infected people, like Washington State. Nevertheless, the figures do not support the position that overall infection rates are low, because the government simply don't know, and they won't know until test coverage is significantly higher.

The pathetic testing performance of the USA is in stark contrast to all other developed nations, as described by Business Insider. Their report has a table comparing test coverage (tests per capita) for a number of nations: the USA trails the rankings by a huge margin (by a factor of more than 700 compared to South Korea)!

Added to that is the cost for US citizens and residents. Donald Trump announced that health insurers would cover the cost of testing, which is fine if you have insurance, but insurers will not necessarily cover the costs of treatment.

How is it that a rich nation like the USA has such poor provision of health care, especially during a world-wide health crisis? Why do the voters tolerate such a cavalier attitude to their health?