OldTimeAFLGuy Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 38 minutes ago, BillsFanNC said: The CDC did do that. They rolled out the test kits in a short window and they were crap due to a contaminatefd negative control. The key word here is surveillance. The CDC conducts flu surveillance and is equipped to roll out other tests for surveillance, not to test on a mass scale or to manufacture enough tests to "test every american" as some journalists are ridiculously asking for. A rapid flu immuno diagnostic test helped dramatically in the H1N1 pandemic because while those tests are only able to tell you if you have flu A or B, they still allow for rapid screening of patients. In a pandemic situation with the 2009 flu, if a patient is flu A positive by the rapid test you just treat them as if it's the pandemic strain and you send a subset of the samples to CDC for surveillance confirmation by RT-PCR. ...probably wrong, but I thought I read they refused to use other kits successfully developed elsewhere in the world because they wanted to develop their own....hope it is not true with time being of the essence...
BillsFanNC Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 1 minute ago, OldTimeAFLGuy said: ...probably wrong, but I thought I read they refused to use other kits successfully developed elsewhere in the world because they wanted to develop their own....hope it is not true with time being of the essence... WHO offered kits and CDC did not take them. 1
OldTimeAFLGuy Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 8 minutes ago, BillsFanNC said: WHO offered kits and CDC did not take them. ...thanks......sad that wasted time may have killed...……….
K-9 Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 9 minutes ago, BillsFanNC said: WHO offered kits and CDC did not take them. The decision to reject the WHO offer did a lot to stymie early control efforts. It was a mistake of epic proportions. Senseless really. 14 minutes ago, OldTimeAFLGuy said: ...probably wrong, but I thought I read they refused to use other kits successfully developed elsewhere in the world because they wanted to develop their own....hope it is not true with time being of the essence... It’s absolutely true. 1
OldTimeAFLGuy Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 Just now, K-9 said: The decision to reject the WHO offer did a lot to stymie early control efforts. It was a mistake of epic proportions. Senseless really. ...almost as if there was/is an underlying turf war between CDC and FDA...….great timing if true...……..
BillsFanNC Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 1 minute ago, K-9 said: The decision to reject the WHO offer did a lot to stymie early control efforts. It was a mistake of epic proportions. Senseless really. It’s absolutely true. Yes, but they didnt take them because regulations only allowed for them to use CDC validated tests, and the WHO tests hadn't been validated by CDC. It took lifting those regulations to allow for testing on the scale that seems to be now necessary.
K-9 Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 1 minute ago, OldTimeAFLGuy said: ...almost as if there was/is an underlying turf war between CDC and FDA...….great timing if true...…….. I’m gonna resist getting into my list of grievances here, lest it invite over the top, politically charged responses from a certain segment of the board. I’ll just say that it wasn’t convenient to see a big spike in positive tests and the best way to prevent seeing a big spike in positive tests is to limit the amount of tests available. 3 minutes ago, BillsFanNC said: Yes, but they didnt take them because regulations only allowed for them to use CDC validated tests, and the WHO tests hadn't been validated by CDC. It took lifting those regulations to allow for testing on the scale that seems to be now necessary. Those regulations could have been lifted in five minutes. Redfield has that authority.
BillsFanNC Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 (edited) 7 minutes ago, K-9 said: Those regulations could have been lifted in five minutes. Redfield has that authority. Absolutely they could have. I'm not absolving them of blame, but this was a perfect storm of a colossal reagent manufacturing ***** up teamed with the inability of stodgy government bureaucracies to be nimble when necessary. The first one most people didnt see coming, the second is like the sun rising in the east. Edited March 17, 2020 by BillsFanNC 1
OldTimeAFLGuy Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 7 minutes ago, K-9 said: I’m gonna resist getting into my list of grievances here, lest it invite over the top, politically charged responses from a certain segment of the board. I’ll just say that it wasn’t convenient to see a big spike in positive tests and the best way to prevent seeing a big spike in positive tests is to limit the amount of tests available. Those regulations could have been lifted in five minutes. Redfield has that authority. ...certainly agree and have no interest in politicizing it as well....serves no purpose to reach the desired result IMO...…... 1
BillsFan4 Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 (edited) Person who attended Sabres game on March 5th tests positive for Coronavirus: https://wgr550.radio.com/articles/news/person-who-attended-sabres-game-tests-positive-for-covid-19 hopefully since it’s the 17th this person wasn’t sick when they went to the game. Edited March 17, 2020 by BillsFan4
Hardhatharry Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 (edited) 2 minutes ago, BillsFan4 said: Person who attended Sabres game on March 5th tests positive for Coronavirus: https://wgr550.radio.com/articles/news/person-who-attended-sabres-game-tests-positive-for-covid-19 Who would attend a Sabres game on March 5th so far after the season is over? Edited March 17, 2020 by Hardhatharry 1
teef Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 my staff will be laid off as of 1 pm today, and we're going to shut down for at least two weeks. i'm sick to my stomach. 4
Gugny Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 22 minutes ago, teef said: my staff will be laid off as of 1 pm today, and we're going to shut down for at least two weeks. i'm sick to my stomach. Man, I am so sorry to hear this, Teef.
Hapless Bills Fan Posted March 17, 2020 Author Posted March 17, 2020 3 hours ago, BillsFanNC said: The CDC did do that. They rolled out the test kits in a short window and they were crap due to a contaminatefd negative control. The key word here is surveillance. The CDC conducts flu surveillance and is equipped to roll out other tests for surveillance, not to test on a mass scale or to manufacture enough tests to "test every american" as some journalists are ridiculously asking for. A rapid flu immuno diagnostic test helped dramatically in the H1N1 pandemic because while those tests are only able to tell you if you have flu A or B, they still allow for rapid screening of patients. In a pandemic situation with the 2009 flu, if a patient is flu A positive by the rapid test you just treat them as if it's the pandemic strain and you send a subset of the samples to CDC for surveillance confirmation by RT-PCR. If you look at the linked stories I gave, it is not clear at all that the problem was a "contaminated negative control". That would actually not fit with the data that 5 state health labs were able to run tests from the kits successfully. I don't want to go into it too deep here, but if you want to say that's what the problem is, provide sources and let's see how they stack up for cred with what I provided. The sources I gave say the problem was the CDC ignored the WHO standard, and decided they wanted to design a test that would test simultaneously for several coronaviruses including SARS and MERS. The result was susceptibility to picking up environmental contamination with a wide range of harmless viruses in their negative control. That's not a 'contaminated negative control', that's a testing design flaw that rendered the test unusable except to the highest standards of operation. Surveillance testing means you are able to screen a section of the population (test on a mass scale) not limit testing to people who are critically ill. In the past, the CDC has developed and rolled out large numbers of novel tests for other potentially epidemic diseases quite quickly. China and at least one other country (I think Korea, might be Taiwan) are now rolling out two different versions of a true screening kit that provides 15 minute results. One is based upon detecting covid-19 antibodies, the other is based on detecting an early antibody response that covid-19 seems to trigger more than flu. Testing every American is stupid, but we should at this point be able to test everyone who has symptoms (fever most common) and everyone who has known contact with a Covid19 positive person. 1
Hapless Bills Fan Posted March 17, 2020 Author Posted March 17, 2020 Personal story of being mis-diagnosed and treated for flu, but actually having Covid-19: https://www.nola.com/news/coronavirus/article_35531ff4-66d9-11ea-95b0-7797f71d169a.html Best thoughts and wishes to the guy who is still on a respirator, fighting for his life. This is where more tests would really help. It may be that steroids have a detrimental effect on the disease treatment, while some antiviral drugs may help.
Jrb1979 Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 59 minutes ago, teef said: my staff will be laid off as of 1 pm today, and we're going to shut down for at least two weeks. i'm sick to my stomach. Sorry to hear that. I hope for you and your staff it is only 2 weeks. I pray that this ends quick and we can get to back to normal sooner rather then later. I'm a little scared for myself as I work in retail that sells groceries so I have to be around a lot of people daily.
Hapless Bills Fan Posted March 17, 2020 Author Posted March 17, 2020 4 hours ago, Sundancer said: The most encouraging news in the press conference yesterday was that the US would have the capability of doing 1,5, and 10 million tests per week over the next 3 weeks. When we are testing the snot out of people, that's when we will see a massive COVID-19 spike in cases, but also can start knowing there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Because until we are hard core quarantining the infected people (and their contacts), we can't reopen the economy, and if we want to return to a recognizable country, we need to that really quickly. For those minimizing it, it's probably time to stop. What's happening in Europe is no way to tackle this. The US reacted too slowly but faster than the EU has and it will make a difference. This is my fervent prayer, but the lack of a more coordinated national response (eg asking governors to close restaurants and bars nationwide, so people are still out in bars partying for St Paddy's in some places) is worrisome from a mitigation standpoint. 3 hours ago, OldTimeAFLGuy said: ...probably wrong, but I thought I read they refused to use other kits successfully developed elsewhere in the world because they wanted to develop their own....hope it is not true with time being of the essence... Correct. Not only did they reject the kits, they rejected the testing guidelines and decided to roll their own. From 28 Feb article:https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus-covid-19-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 — “surveillance testing” of hundreds of people in possible hotspots. Epidemiologists in other countries have used this sort of testing to track the spread of the disease before large numbers of people turn up at hospitals. This story is based on interviews with state and local public health officials and scientists across the country, which, taken together, describe a frustrating, bewildering bureaucratic process that seemed at odds with the urgency of the growing threat."
Hardhatharry Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 Italy over 31k now over 3000+ a day right now with over 300+ deaths a day. World closing in on 200k 2
OldTimeAFLGuy Posted March 17, 2020 Posted March 17, 2020 4 minutes ago, Hapless Bills Fan said: This is my fervent prayer, but the lack of a more coordinated national response (eg asking governors to close restaurants and bars nationwide, so people are still out in bars partying for St Paddy's in some places) is worrisome from a mitigation standpoint. Correct. Not only did they reject the kits, they rejected the testing guidelines and decided to roll their own. From 28 Feb article:https://www.propublica.org/article/cdc-coronavirus-covid-19-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 — “surveillance testing” of hundreds of people in possible hotspots. Epidemiologists in other countries have used this sort of testing to track the spread of the disease before large numbers of people turn up at hospitals. This story is based on interviews with state and local public health officials and scientists across the country, which, taken together, describe a frustrating, bewildering bureaucratic process that seemed at odds with the urgency of the growing threat." …...from what I've read Hap, this seems to be your line of work.....and thanks for passing info along to TBD......would you surmise that there was/is a turf war between CDC and FDA?.....from a layperson's perspective, if a successful kit was available, wouldn't time be of the essence versus week(s) going by?...…I just had an admin person go for testing, but was declined because her symptoms were not significant enough....she just returned from Mexico and thinks she has a chest cold, similar to what her partner had prior to leaving....returning from international travel and being age 56 still could not qualify her for testing......
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