20 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 61.0 ms ] thread
It turns out government institutions shrivel and die when you try to strangle them. Who'd a thunk?
This is what happens when you elect utter incompetents to run the federal government, and they cut off funding for public-benefit agencies. The American people are getting exactly what they voted for. Expect things to get much worse.
What does this have to do with Trump? Way too many people give credit to him when thousands of people are making government decisions that affect all on a daily basis.

1. No one cares who your political allegiance is to.

2. Stick to the subject matter at hand, and let’s keep politics off HN. There are more appropriate forums for that.

3. Add to the context of the story or move on. Trolls are not welcome in these parts.

*edits for spelling errors

This is not a useful comment. I see no citations in your comment that proves that this is trumps fault or has anything to do with him.
the cdc is part of the executive branch. Use your brain
Trump appointed Pence to head America's response to the COVID-19 epidemic.

If Pence has not been competent enough to get the CDC to do enough testing, it is ultimately Trump's responsibility.

An effective response to a health crisis also demands transparency, not hiding the scale of the epidemic by refusing to report the number of tests the CDC has conducted. That's yet another gaffe that Pence, and by extension Trump is responsible for.

The media is seeing this as a political propaganda event, watch as this is spun into a major campaign issue, with massive finger pointing
They'd piss on a spark plug if they thought it could hurt Trump. Now this version of a corona virus is their latest opportunity to take another whack at him.
Trump’s not even named once in the article, nor are party affiliations.
What can be done to change this situation rapidly? Countries like South Korea and China are able to run tens of thousands of tests daily. What is it about their testing regimes that makes them so much more scalable than the US's?
Honestly? Send our tests to SK/China. At this point it seems like it's hard to trust anyone else
(comment deleted)
This article is irresponsible. The federal government has been forthcoming about the problem with one component in the test kit they released. They provided a work-around quickly and have updated the test protocol and are releasing updated test kits. At least where I sit in New York State cooperation between our Democratic Governor and the Federal Agencies has been a good example. New York can now produce test kits and are quickly ramping up to 1000 tests per day.

I would note that this was made possible by scientists with federal (and state) funding to obtain the structure of the virus quickly and that these results helped guide the development of test kits.