Failings within the CDC

The argument

The US took so long to act because it was unable to roll out workable testing kits, and that responsibility fell to the CDC. Its initial tests did not work, which forced a second round of procurement and development — and the time lost to that second round is the whole of the argument, because everything a public health response can do depends on knowing where the virus already is. Without tests, the virus spread rapidly and undetected, so that by the time working kits were ready the damage had already been done. This is the crucial feature of an epidemic that distinguishes a delay here from a delay almost anywhere else in government: the problem does not wait at its current size while the response is assembled. It grows throughout, and it grows fastest while it is invisible, which means a testing failure does not merely postpone the response but guarantees that the response will meet a much larger outbreak when it finally arrives. The consequences went beyond counting cases. The failure also meant that health bodies were unable to detect the pathways through which the virus was spreading. Effective prevention in such cases relies on viral tracing, as it did in China and Singapore, and tracing in turn allows authorities to isolate the geographical areas where large clusters may be forming before those clusters show. Every one of those measures takes test results as its input; none of them can be run on estimates. So the failure was not one shortfall among several but the one that disabled the rest. None of these things could take place, and the reason they could not was the CDC.

Context

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took three weeks longer than expected to deliver testing kits to laboratories for approval. This delay was a disaster.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The CDC was slow to provide laboratories with testing kits, but the critical part of this operational failure is in what it has revealed. As Robert P. Baird writes in the New Yorker, 'the cascading effects that [this] had on the country’s covid-19 preparations suggest a much larger problem with the way the United States has structured its pandemic response. That problem was exacerbated by a President who has simultaneously underplayed the severity of the outbreak and overpromised the means available to fight it.'.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] The White House did not instruct the CDC to expedite tests