How ‘bureaucratic inertia and disinterest’, an ‘alphabet soup of overlapping authority’, ignoring early warnings and muddled decision-making delayed coronavirus testing in the US

‘...Over January and February, agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services not only failed to make early use of the hundreds of labs across the United States, they enforced regulatory roadblocks that prevented non-government labs from assisting, according to documents obtained by CNN, and interviews with 14 scientists and physicians at individual laboratories and national laboratory associations.

‘When the CDC stumbled out of the blocks in early February, releasing a flawed test that took it weeks to correct, labs across the country had been effectively sidelined. Many public health labs were waiting for the revised CDC tests, while commercial and clinical labs were barred from conducting their own tests unless they went through a complex, slow process of applying for their own "emergency use authorisation" from the US Food and Drug Administration.

‘As a result, the government squandered a critical month during which aggressive and widespread testing might greatly have reduced the speed and scale of the pandemic.’

Read here (CNN, April 9, 2020)