How The CDC Botched Its Initial Coronavirus Response With Faulty Tests

Topline: U.S. health officials made crucial mistakes in their initial response to the coronavirus that public health experts say hindered the government’s ability to treat the virus earlier—including the use of faulty testing kits and limiting how many people could be tested—but officials say relief is on the way with more testing capacity.

• Public health experts say the CDC’s first critical misstep was opting to create its own testing kit rather than use the one provided by the World Health Organization, ProPublica reported. 
• When the CDC, on February 4, 2020, did send out its own test kits to labs across the country to confirm cases on-site, some were faulty and produced inconclusive results.
• Another problem: Because hospitals couldn’t use their own in-house tests in lieu of the CDC’s flawed one, they had to send samples to one of a dozen labs with testing capability and the results then had to be certified by the CDC’s central lab in Atlanta, which created delays. 
• As a result of the bottleneck, the CDC enacted strict criteria over who could be tested, which only included recent travelers from China or people who had had contact with an infected person, a move health officials say failed to diagnose early cases of the virus in California and Washington State. 
• The CDC has since fixed mistakes in its testing kit while expanding the criteria to allow for more people to get tested, and the FDA announced on Saturday it has given some academic and hospital labs the go-ahead to use their own tests instead of having to send samples off to other facilities. 
• HHS Secretary Alexander Azar said Sunday those changes will allow the U.S. to test 75,000 people by the end of the week.
• The CDC did not immediately respond to request for comment from Forbes.

Key background: The limited testing capacity in the U.S. stands in stark contrast to other countries dealing with outbreaks; South Korea can test 10,000 people per day (and even created drive-thru testing facilities), while the U.K. has done 13,000 tests so far. The U.S. has only tested 1,583 people so far, health officials said. The slowdown has frustrated public health experts who say the U.S. hasn’t acted aggressively enough to proactively combat the disease’s spread.

Crucial quote: “We weren’t the first country to be infected, and we didn’t learn from those other countries,” said Rishi Desai, a former epidemic intelligence officer at the CDC who is now the chief medical officer at Osmosis, a Baltimore-based online medical information startup. Desai told Forbes agency officials might have thought they could manufacture a more effective test, but should have used the WHO test while it developed its own. “It’s unfortunate because it shows we’re not aggressively ahead of this.” 

News peg: Six people in the U.S. have died so far from the coronavirus, all of who lived in Washington State. Scientists say Covid-19 has been spreading undetected over the past six weeks in Washington, and officials warn that more cases will crop up soon around the country as more people begin to get tested. Globally, nearly 89,000 people have been infected and about 3,000 have died as the disease continues to spread past China, namely to South Korea, Iran and Italy. 

What’s next: The Department of Health and Human Services is investigating the initial flaw in test kits, Politico reported. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Forbes. The inconclusive results were caused by a problematic chemical, and the kits themselves may have been manufactured in a contaminated lab, Axios reported. 

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