COVID-19 vs. the CDC - How the US is Currently Handling the Crisis Worse Than Any Other Nation

Can you guess who is currently winning the battle?

In January 2020, when the world was reeling from how quickly the novel Coronavirus was spreading in China, the US government essentially did nothing.

As the virus began spreading to surrounding countries as predicted by a Canadian Artificial Intelligence company in December of 2019, the US government began discussing the possibilities of it spreading to the United States.

Somewhere in that time-frame the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (the CDC) decided that they would begin developing their own testing kits for COVID-19. While other countries had already made strides in the process, the CDC started from scratch.

When the CDC testing kits were completed it was discovered that they were badly flawed and would have to be remade. As a result, the US does not have enough functioning testing kits for any effective mass-testing. Some states claim they still have no test kits...

Back in the middle of January a South Korean Artificial Intelligence-fueled molecular biotech company, Seegene, developed a test kit incredibly quickly (3 weeks) and had it was approved by the Korean government within a week (also incredibly quickly). Their test provides accurate results in <4 hours as compared to the unknown accuracy of the fumbled CDC test kits which reportedly require 24-48 hours for initial results, and 4-5 days minimum for "confirmed" results.

South Korea took the threat of this virus seriously and the urgency of their response was appropriate for the circumstances. But note that South Korea has thousands of known cases of COVID-19 because they are testing their population. Knowing who has the virus has made it possible for Korea to battle and contain it.

Aggressive testing by affected countries has been the only way to contain the virus because of the long incubation period without symptoms. Countries who have not been aggressively and proactively testing are making an egregious mistake. While this particular strain of Coronavirus is not as lethal as SARS, it spreads more effectively; mass-testing the population is the only way to contain the spread.

The geometric rate with which this virus spreads is what makes it so dangerous. The real danger is not the death rate or the symptoms, it is the way the virus is transmitted and spread. Here's why:

Every region has a finite number of Intensive Care Units (ICU) in their medical services. When hundreds of people across the country need to be in an ICU, it's not a problem. When hundreds of thousands of people need to be in an ICU, the system gets overloaded and doctors are forced to triage the patients.

This means medical staffers are forced to make the decision of who lives and who dies, based purely on the available space in their region. If the medical system collapses under the overload, the entire nation becomes at risk for collapse because of an out-of-control death-rate caused by the inability to meet the demand for care.

South Korea's Seegene used Artificial Intelligence to make their test quickly. The South Korean government made the testing kits go into production and immediately deployed them because they recognized the threat and acted on it appropriately. The need was clear, so Seegene put every single employee – including scientists & executives – onto the assembly lines to build kits quickly enough to meet the demand.

The Seegene test is processed through an automated system instead of the manual process the CDC uses. This enables the testing to scale in order to meet demand for massive numbers of people, while delivering reliable results in a few hours, instead of a week for the CDC's tests. That time keeps the patients from spreading the disease further while their results are still undetermined.

Seegene's production line is making approximately enough kits to test 100,000 people per week and the whole world is asking for their kits. Except for the US...

The FDA has not approved the Seegene test for use in the United States.

Theories on why the FDA will not approve the tests includes the CDC/FDA seeking to avoid the <$20 per person cost for Seegene's test. But, knowing the track-record of government spending and the fact that the CDC's test is done manually with 5+ days for results (which is then verified by an undisclosed third-party lab), it's virtually impossible to assume that the CDC's testing method is less expensive. ...and it's clear that it isn't as effective.

This essential miscalculation amounts to an absolute failure in the United States response to this global pandemic. Certainly it doesn't help that the White House is confusing matters by denying the severity of the pandemic, having understated the seriousness of the situation. But the inappropriately slow and ineffective response by the CDC/FDA is disturbing and could potentially be catastrophic for the US.

Testing and confirming cases of COVID-19 make the numbers swell when you're doing mass-testing of the population, but this method keeps the new case numbers as low as possible by enabling the isolation of those who are infected, thereby slowing or stopping the spread further. This, in turn, drops the death-rate numbers significantly.

Ignoring the need for rapid, mass testing of populations makes the number of confirmed cases low but sets up a scenario where the country's medical infrastructure can easily be overrun, making the death-rate shoot upward needlessly.

What do you think the United States ought be doing to fight COVID-19? Should the CDC, FDA, and White House be held responsible if the death-rate in the US exceeds the global averages?