Quote:
Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski
Two people from my office have been home with symptoms. They say they tested negative for flu. I didn't know there was a flu test. And they were then tested for THE virus. They are waiting for results.
I thought there were no tests, or not enough? Or is it just that we do not have a rapid test?
They have been out of the office for over a week, so I'm thinking I dodged it. For now.
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My understanding is that in the United States, for too long, there was only one test, provided by the CDC and performed in a few labs. It look two days to get a negative. If you were at, for example, Stanford Hospital, they could do a bunch of other tests (e.g., flu) on site, but to test you for Covid-19 they had to send the sample off-site to one of those labs and then wait the two days. No one had many of the tests and the labs didn't have a lot of capacity, so the CDC set rules about who could get tested (you had to have been in China, or in contact with someone who had been). This is why there was unspotted community spread -- under the CDC rules, people who might have caught the virus in the community couldn't be tested.
A researcher in Washington disobeyed federal guidance to do testing and spotted the community (and then was told to stop testing). eta: There were emergency workers in WA who self-quarantined because they were exposed to residents at the Kirkland old-age home, and who were swabbed with test kits, and the kits were sent to the labs, but the labs never got to them before the swabs expired. They were understandably pissed.
Eventually the CDC allowed others to develop their own tests.
Stanford, to continue the example, is one of the places that has done that. If you're at their hospital and you need a test, they can do that in-house. But in other places, that's not the case. I read that Maine only has 2,000 tests, so there must not be hospitals or labs doing there own testing there. I think the same is true for Hawaii.
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