On Jan. 20, the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the US. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) put in place strict guidelines to develop testing kits for the virus.
In order to maintain high quality tests, the FDA only allowed some state and public labs to have the test. Only 90 testing kits, distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), were circulated to those labs leaving out researchers, hospitals and universities around the country who were ready to develop test kits as reported on March 30, 2020 in The Washington Post. As luck would have it, the CDC’s test kits had problems.
Still, the FDA did not lift the restrictions on who could make the kits. While this failure with testing kits delayed the testing of people who were now being exposed to the virus, the Trump Administration was denying that there was a problem at all, telling the nation the virus was contained, when in fact that was far from the truth.
On Feb. 29, the FDA lifted the restrictions on who could develop the test, but, by that time, the virus had begun to spread throughout Washington state.
Even with these new tests being developed, the CDC guidelines said only certain people could be tested, people coming from Wuhan, China and people who had been in contact with someone that tested positive for the virus leaving many Americans not knowing if they carried the virus.
There were failures at numerous levels in the US’s response to this virus. Had this country’s preparedness response been as focused and developed as Africa’s, could there be fewer cases here and our COVID-19 numbers more like Africa?
Africa has shown the world how preparing to fight a pandemic is done having had ample practice with prior epidemics.