As
the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after
country in January and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track
its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon
devising its own test.
The
federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines
used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of
its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was
sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it
didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the
disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it
falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.
As
a result, until Wednesday the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration
only allowed those state labs to use the test — a decision with
potentially significant consequences. The lack of a reliable test
prevented local officials from taking a crucial first step in coping
with a possible outbreak | |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment