True!

Actually, these v***ses tend to have similar mutations in masse. It is built into their genome to mutate.

As for temp, the only thing I have seen is that in areas of higher temps, there doesn't seem to be any changes but that is still debatable. Is it warmer in China because it certainly seems to be declining there.

Why? Back then Obama was president, that's why. No body saw ebola as an opportunity to take Obama down. Of course I am referring to limiting travel to the US from China, how ever, much of the hypersensitive nature of the left has spread to the rest of the world. And witness that we can't even refer to it as the China v***s or the W***n v***s. It's r****t, baby!! LOL!

Also, think borders. Every body world wide have become all sensitive to closed borders.

Do you think there should have been a response to H1N1 like this? If so, you are near to your answer about the line between sensible reaction and paranoia.

Gates, another lay person with an opinion, like Al Gore and G****l w*****g.

Why were we not prepared for a p******c last year, some ten years after the H1N1 out break? Tell us why Obama's "p******c response team" hadn't gotten the US prepared long ago.

As for funding, the CDC has received increased funding despite Trump wanting to cut it, but now, seeing what the CDC has been spending it's money on, I can see why.

And tell me, which immunological experts actually delayed the respond because Trump had the opinion that is would not be such a big thing. Trump is a lay person! They had and have a job to do. Did they delay because of Trump's opinion?? If so, they DO need to be fired.

The only politicization is occurring on the part of the Trump h**ers and democrats. Trump's opinion should not have slowed down a response to an infectious disease any more than y'all harping on your claim that it's Trump's fault will help our response. Y'all are playing pure politics just like you have been doing with every single issue that has come up since Trump was elected.

It is blame time: the crash in the markets is directly attributable to your Trump hating push for panic by hyping this up to ridiculous levels. That part is truly on y'all!! 100%.

Explain to us why experts in the field of immunology, knowledgeable about such things as infectious v***ses, would see what was happening in China but delay their actions to prepare for it based upon the opinion of a lay person, even if it's the president??

Answer: They wouldn't. Now tell us more about the incompetence of the US response to this and especially relate to us how Obama's "p******c response team" had us prepared for this? Even if they were fired two years ago, which they weren't, what had they done prior to that, some eight years or more after the H1N1 v***s appeared??????

The question was regarding the CDC.

Who ya talking to, peg?? Use the quote reply button to have your comment directed at the person you are responding to.

The implication that the CDC delayed doing it's job because of the opinion of a lay person, Trump, is absurd and insulting.

Woody actually thinks, like so many stupid and ignorant people, that US scientists delayed doing their jobs because of the opinion of a lay person, Trump, that the v***s was going to be easily handled and not that bad.

Per politifact which is fairly close to the t***h: “Fired” may be a little strong, but in 2018, top national security officials handling p******cs left abruptly and were not replaced by the Trump administration. As for funding, there’s no question that the Trump administration sought to cut key CDC budget categories. But thanks to Congress, that funding was restored and even increased in bills that Trump ultimately signed.

So ultimately, they WERE reassigned to CDC over sight and although Trump wanted to decrease funding for the CDC, it ultimately continued to receive funding and, in fact, got increased funding.

As for December, China didn't even report a case until late December and even then said they had no evidence that it could spread between humans. At any rate, Trump early on tgried to eliminate incoming flights from Chine which your people condemned as being over reactionary and r****t.

The failure of the "p******c response team" was that they did practically nothing to prepare for the next flu like v***s to appear, and they do appear fairly regularly. YOur insistence that Trump could have responded better is disingenuous and has been refuted by those in the CDC who know.


Here are the four main reasons the testing issues have been so bad:

Red Tape

The Food and Drug Administration has a protocol called e*******y use a***********n, or EUA, through which it clears tests from labs around the country for use in an outbreak. Getting more of these tests up and running would greatly increase the capacity of doctors and public-health officials to screen patients for the c****av***s.

Former FDA officials I spoke with said that during past outbreaks, EUAs could be granted in just a couple of days. But this time, the requirements for getting an EUA were so complicated that it would have taken weeks to receive one, says Alex Greninger, the assistant director of the v******y division at the University of Washington Medical Center, which is located right near the heart of the American outbreak. Greninger told me clinical labs were not allowed to begin testing at all before they had received the EUA, even if they had already internally made sure their tests worked. Though these regulations are in place to ensure that faulty lab tests don’t get used on patients, several microbiologists told me they felt the precautions were excessive for a fast-moving outbreak of this scale. “The speed of this v***s versus the speed of the FDA and the EUA process is mismatched,” he said.

Read: What will you do if you start coughing?

On February 28, Greninger and dozens of other clinical microbiologists wrote a letter to Congress complaining that the EUA process was slowing down the ability of their labs to deploy c****av***s tests. “Many of our clinical laboratories have already validated [tests] that we could begin testing with tomorrow, but cannot due [to] the FDA EUA process,” they wrote. The following day, the FDA changed the EUA process so that labs like Greninger’s could begin testing—they would just have to submit data for the FDA’s authorization two weeks later. But weeks had already passed during which many labs and hospitals were unable to use their tests.

“The EUA pathway … has served for Ebola and Zika, etc.,” says Mark Miller, the chief medical officer at bioMérieux, an infectious-disease diagnostic company based in France. “And then you have a situation like now with c****av***s, which I don't think any of us have ever lived through.”

Margaret Hamburg, who served as the FDA commissioner from 2009 to 2015, told me that while she doesn’t have knowledge of what went on inside the FDA over the past few months, the agency could have proactively reached out to different national and international labs to see whether their tests could be approved for use in the U.S. For example, the FDA might ask a lab, “Would you be interested to try to redirect what you were doing for a MERS diagnostic to a novel-c****av***s diagnostic?” she says. Instead, as The New York Times reported, federal officials told one Seattle infectious-disease expert, Helen Chu, to stop testing for the c****av***s entirely. (In an email, an FDA spokesperson denied that the agency acted slowly. Ensuring the validity of tests is important, she noted, to prevent false results.)

It looks like Chu was not alone. Dozens of labs in the U.S. were eager to make tests and willing to test patients, but they were hamstrung by regulations for most of February, even as the v***s crept silently across the nation.

Hard-to-Get V***s Samples

Labs and companies need samples of the v***s itself in order to make their tests, but delays in getting access to samples further slowed down the test-development process. The c****av***s originated in China, and as several microbiologists told me, the Chinese government does not allow specimens to be shipped outside its borders.

Many researchers have had difficulty getting their hands on samples even as the v***s has spread. “I was working the phones to try to get access to the v***s,” Greninger said.

BioMérieux just released three versions of its c****av***s test this week, after beginning work on it on January 23. Miller says that with every v***l outbreak, the company’s biggest problem by far is getting access to v***s and patient specimens so that it can validate its tests. Even when working with nonauthoritarian countries, a combination of government processes, researcher reticence, complex shipping regulations, and patient-privacy concerns makes getting samples difficult for diagnostic companies like his.

Read: How to understand your state’s c****av***s numbers

Miller said it would help if researchers, governments, and companies firmed up pathogen-sharing contracts in advance of an outbreak, but so far that hasn’t happened. “The problem is that in the past, industry has been viewed as this dirty participant in all of this, and we can't be trusted, and why would I have contracts with you?” Miller says. “But that’s ignoring the plain fact that we’re the ones that create the product in the end.”

Lacking Equipment

The type of test Greninger is making is called a lab-developed test. To be used in other labs, his test requires special instruments that extract and then amplify the RNA that makes up the v***s. However, labs across the country—like those at many county hospitals—don’t have the tools to do this. They can only run a simple type of test called a sample-to-answer test. As late as this week, several lab directors told me that no sample-to-answer versions of the c****av***s test had been approved in the U.S. “That means that the vast majority of clinical labs in this country will not be able to do in-house testing at this time,” says Susan Butler Wu, an associate professor of clinical pathology at the University of Southern California.

The U.S. health-care system is broken up into state and county public-health laboratories, which have different equipment than academic research institutions, which have different equipment than hospitals that diagnose patients. So the same test won’t necessarily work in different places. “We don’t have a nationalized health-care system where you put the same equipment in all the hospitals,” Wu says. “We have all these independent hospital systems with their own equipment in their own labs.”

Even though some hospitals actually have the new, functional CDC tests, the extraction machines and reagents that are used to perform them are in short supply. “We’ve been pleading to the research laboratories to please, if they have RNA-extraction machines, to give them to the hospital,” says Michael Mina, an associate medical director in the department of pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Leadership and Coordination Problems

For months, President Trump has made light of the c****av***s, telling attendees at a Black History Month reception, for instance, that perhaps the v***s could miraculously disappear. He claimed on Twitter that the U.S. has done a “great job” handling the outbreak. Such a cavalier attitude seems unlikely to have motivated health officials to take things seriously. It also contradicted advice from most public-health experts. Even Scott Gottlieb, who recently resigned as Trump’s FDA commissioner, wrote in The Wall Street Journal on February 4 that “it’s time to start testing more people.”

Containing a new infectious disease requires a lot of close collaboration between the president, the CDC, the FDA, and other parts of the Department of Health and Human Services, several Obama-era health officials told me. “One reason we were able to move quickly [during the Ebola outbreak] was that there was a great deal of coordination and issue spotting and troubleshooting that went on,” Hamburg, the former FDA commissioner, told me.

Read: You’re likely to get the c****av***s

The different arms of the sprawling health department have to feel like they’re all pulling toward the same goal. “I think you have fabulous people at CDC and FDA all doing the best they can, but we always found it was incredibly important to have all the agencies together in the same room,” says Jesse Goodman, a former FDA chief scientist who helped manage the country’s response to the 2009 H1N1 outbreak. When issues came up that merited the attention of the White House, he says, they got it.

Though Trump has proposed a payroll-tax break, as my colleague Peter Nicholas has pointed out, “Much of what he’s said publicly about the v***s has been wrong, a consequence of downplaying any troubles on his watch.”




This is fairly good information right up to the part where they claim Trump down playing the v***s slowed the response. I know of no science based expert who would delay action such as this based upon a lay person's "opinion." To imply that they delayed because of that is just STUPID!

Agree totally. His "p******c response team" were not very effective. They weren't fired either, they were t***sferred to the CDC. Apparently the CDC has been doing some social work and not focusing on their true mission; that of dealing with infectious diseases.

Here is a good source of ongoing information on cases and deaths. You can look at world totals and also by country. The graphs on China are revealing. It looks like it takes about a month for the v***s to run it's course, based upon this. At the very least new cases and deaths plateau's after about 4 weeks or less.

http://www.worldometers.info/c****av***s/country/china/

My take is that this is a quickly mutating v***s which becomes less virulent with time. They claim it is not temperature sensitive but I think the jury is out on that.

Agreed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!