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When historians of the future look back at the 2020 pandemic, the heroic work of Helen Y. Chu, a flu researcher at the University of Washington, will be worthy of recognition.

In late January, Chu was testing nasal swabs for the Seattle Flu Study to monitor influenza spread when she learned of the first case of COVID-19 in Washington state. She deemed it a pressing public health matter to document if and how the illness was spreading locally, so that early containment efforts could succeed. So she sought regulatory approval to adapt the Flu Study to test for the coronavirus, but the federal government denied the request because the original project was funded to study only influenza. 

Aware of the urgency, Chu’s team bravely defied the order and conducted the testing anyway. Soon they identified a local case in a teenager without any travel history, followed by others. Still, the government tried to shutter their efforts until the outbreak grew dangerous enough to command attention. 

Needless testing delays, prompted by excessive regulatory interference, eliminated any chances of curbing the pandemic at its initial stages. Even after Chu went out on a limb to sound alarms, a heavy-handed bureaucracy crushed the nation’s ability to roll out early and widespread testing across the country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention infamously blundered its own test, while also impeding state and private labs from coming on board, fueling a massive shortage. 

The long holdup created “a backlog of testing that needed to be done,” says Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist who is a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. 

 In a public health crisis, “the ideal situation” would allow the government’s test to be “supplanted by private laboratories” without such “a lag in that transition,” Adalja says. Only after the eventual release of CDC’s test could private industry “begin in earnest” to develop its own versions under the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency use authorization. 

In a statement, CDC acknowledged that “this process has not gone as smoothly as we would have liked, but there is currently no backlog for testing at CDC.”  

Now, universities and corporations are in a race against time, playing catch up as the virus continues its relentless spread, also afflicting many health care workers on the front lines. 

read more:

https://leapsmag.com/how-excessive-regulation-helped-ignite-covid-19s-rampant-spread/