Trick wrote:what i wrote wasnt implying the virus was an creation, i just wanted to point out that chinese scientists work very closely with foreign scientists in the case of virology. the foreign presence in china has been strong at least since mid 2000. corona viruses has all along been on the reserch agenda cooperating with foreign scientists. the foreign institute that has labs in shandong is specialing in corona viruses......so any talk that china didnt let foreign experts in during this covid-19 outbreak sound strange, foreign and chinese scientists must have for a long time understood that an new corona virus might pop up.....China, India and parts of africa are favourite areas for virologists to do reserch it would seem
It was mentioned that the Those working in the lab May not have taken the protocols seriously enough.
Given the fact that we couldn't get our act together in time, social distancing mixed with ramped-up testing seems to be the best way to proceed.
Lessons from MERS
South Korea learned the importance of preparedness the hard way. In 2015, a South Korean businessman came down with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) after returning from a visit to three Middle Eastern countries. He was treated at three South Korean health facilities before he was diagnosed with MERS and isolated. By then, he had set off a chain of transmission that infected 186 and killed 36, including many patients hospitalized for other ailments, visitors, and hospital staff. Tracing, testing, and quarantining nearly 17,000 people quashed the outbreak after 2 months. The specter of a runaway epidemic alarmed the nation and dented the economy.
“That experience showed that laboratory testing is essential to control an emerging infectious disease,” Kim says. In addition, Oh says, “The MERS experience certainly helped us to improve hospital infection prevention and control.” So far, there are no reports of infections of COVID-19 among South Korean health care workers, he says.
windwalker wrote:some humor,,,my daughters sent me
Tracing, testing, and quarantining nearly 17,000 people quashed the outbreak after 2 months.
Now the US has its experience from which to draw from.
Normally, state public health labs and commercial labs would have been able to create their own PCR tests once it was clear the CDC test wasn’t working.
But because the country is under a public health state of emergency, any new test had to be approved for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). That slow process also contributed to delays in testing. On February 29th, the agency relaxed that rule, and commercial labs started COVID-19 testing.
The fed gov had to step in to change the rule.
Machines are available that can run PCR tests automatically, which also speeds the process. However, it took companies weeks to develop tests for those automated systems and for the Food and Drug Administration to approve them. The pharmaceutical and diagnostics company Roche, for example, didn’t get approval for an automated test until March 13th.
In the United States, the slow rollout of coronavirus PCR tests has been widely attributed to a combination of stringent rules aimed at ensuring their reliability and a complex web of companies and health care systems responsible for developing, carrying out, and paying for tests.
For instance, it would make sense to raise the levees in New Orleans because we know the sea is rising and storms are getting worse. I.e., if they're built to withstand a cat 4, but you know there'll be cat 5s, building for a cat 5.5 would be insurance. Otherwise, it's just a matter of keeping one's fingers crossed.
So, why post it as a model the US can learn from?
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