Saturday, February 29, 2020

Picture Of The Day

People in Tehran wear medical masks amid a coronavirus outbreak in the country. © Sputnik / Anton Bystrov

WNU Editor: The above picture is form this photo-gallery .... This Week in Pictures: 22 - 28 February (Sputnik).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Speed is critical in the response to COVID-19. So why has the United States been so slow in its attempt to develop reliable diagnostic tests and use them widely?

The World Health Organization (WHO) has shipped testing kits to 57 countries. China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week; South Korea has tested 65,000 people so far. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in contrast, has done only 459 tests since the epidemic began. The rollout of a CDC-designed test kit to state and local labs has become a fiasco because it contained a faulty reagent. Labs around the country eager to test more suspected cases—and test them faster—have been unable to do so. No commercial or state labs have the approval to use their own tests.

In what is already an infamous snafu, CDC initially refused a request to test a patient in Northern California who turned out to be the first probable COVID19 case without known links to an infected person.

Anonymous said...

Deadly 1918 flu pandemic’s lessons ignored in Trump’s coronavirus response, historian says