Just a few observations I've made from reading articles. As written previously, the original testing was to be done by kits provided by the CDC. They were somewhat more complicated that other tests used worldwide and as previously noted, the CDC had contaminated part of the test resulting in false positives. Unfortunately this happened at a critical time when it was hope to contain the beginning infections. When private labs tried to jump in and do testing they were caught in a red tape maze that included proposals having to be submitted to the FDA by snail mail rather than email.
On thing that hasn't been mentioned is that the original tests had to be done by a health care worker taking a swab from the back of the nasal cavity. After doing the swabbing the worker than had to change the PPE that the worker was using so as to not infect the next person tested. It was time consuming and we has some shortages in PPE in the beginning. Testing at that point was limited to health care workers and those showing symptoms. Results weren't obtained like a home pregnancy test where you just dip a strip. The sample had to be transported to a lab and then individually tested. Doing large number of tests with these limitations is very difficult. Newer tests that allow an individual to self-sample and kits that give results in 15 minutes will greatly increase our capacity. So the initial problems were failures by our "medical experts" and government regulations. It appears that our current capacity is quickly increasing due to medical innovations and effective oversight.
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