I still haven't seen a full account of what happened at the CDC in early 2020, why they required all samples to go through them and would not condone the WHO test. It took a lab in Washington to run tests semi-illegally to find the first non-imported case in the US.
Everybody knew. It wasn't kept from the rest of us. I even posted about it on MB. Cuomo tried to say his health team didnt know the virus was coming into NY from Italy and Spain on international flights, but even i knew that was ridiculous.. it was all over the media what was happening in Spain and Italy. Cuomo is a Democrat so i don't think it was for "political" reasons per se. aside from the fact that most politicians are stupid.
Article: On February 5th, sixteen days after a Seattle resident who had visited relatives in Wuhan, China, was diagnosed as having the first confirmed case of covid-19 in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, began sending diagnostic tests to a network of about a hundred state, city, and county public-health laboratories. Up to that point, all testing for covid-19 in the U.S. had been done at the C.D.C.; of some five hundred suspected cases tested at the Centers, twelve had confirmed positive. The new test kits would allow about fifty thousand patients to be tested, and they would also make testing much faster, as patient specimens would no longer have to be sent to Atlanta to be evaluated.
Article: On January 21st, a team in Berlin, led by Christian Drosten, one of the scientists who discovered the original sars virus, in 2003, submitted the first paper to describe a protocol for testing for sars-CoV-2. (That protocol would form the basis for a test disseminated, early on, by the World Health Organization.) That same day, Messonnier announced that the C.D.C. had finalized its own test, which it used to confirm the first known case of covid-19 in the U.S.
In Seattle, a team at the University of Washington Virology Lab debated whether it was worth developing their own test. "I'll be honest. I didn't think that this virus was going to do everything it's done," Keith Jerome, the lab's director, told me. "I didn't think it would be a major health issue for the United States." Still, he said, "the last thing we wanted to do was to be caught flat-footed." The U.W. virology lab is subject to strict regulatory oversight, but, thanks to a peculiar feature of U.S. law, it did not initially require any special clearance from the federal government to produce its covid-19 test.
Article: On Feb. 6, a scientist in a small infectious disease lab on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention campus in Atlanta was putting a coronavirus test kit through its final paces. The lab designed and built the diagnostic test in record time, and the little vials that contained necessary reagents to identify the virus were boxed up and ready to go. But NPR has learned the results of that final quality control test suggested something troubling — it said the kit could fail 33% of the time.
Under normal circumstances, that kind of result would stop a test in its tracks, half a dozen public and private lab officials told NPR. But an internal CDC review obtained by NPR confirms that lab officials decided to release the kit anyway. The revelation comes from a CDC internal review, known as a "root-cause analysis," which the agency conducted to understand why an early coronavirus test didn't work properly and wound up costing scientists precious weeks in the early days of a pandemic.
[...]
While the CDC and HHS were trying to determine what was wrong with the kits, public labs were still waiting for something they could use. "We waited another month before we had testing available," Rakeman told NPR.
External Quote:
Your own source continues:
Facts at the time:External Quote:
Article: 28 FEB 2020
The World Health Organization (WHO) has shipped testing kits to 57 countries. China had five commercial tests on the market 1 month ago and can now do up to 1.6 million tests a week; South Korea has tested 65,000 people so far. The U. S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in contrast, has done only 459 tests since the epidemic began.
Article: Overconfidence. The CDC did not initially rely on tests already in use in other countries, because officials thought they could build a better one. Agency leaders did not coordinate with outside manufacturers for support, and they never performed any validations of previously developed tests that could have been used as backup.
The test catastrophe documented by the HHS investigation has led to unprecedented demands from former federal science officials to overhaul the CDC in order to avert another such disaster.
On Jan. 16, the World Health Organization published instructions from the German Center for Infection Research for its successful COVID test. Dozens of countries worldwide began to widely manufacture and distribute it.
Why didn't the CDC team follow suit? Lu, according to the interview notes, said that the health agency scientists thought they could make a better one. The CDC's test mimicked the one it had made for MERS in 2012. "Our MERS assay performed better than WHO's," Lu recounted. And, she added, "We were racing against the clock."
A CDC employee familiar with the development of the test told BuzzFeed News that the health agency had also felt it would be better to have both US and German types of tests available worldwide — and that copying the WHO test would not have been politically possible under Donald Trump. "Imagine the backlash we would have had if CDC had said, 'Hey, yeah, let's use a German test,'" the CDC employee said.
The CDC test was intended only as a tool for the public health agency to detect outbreaks, not to diagnose every sick person walking into an emergency room. Instead, in the early days of the pandemic, it became the only legal US test for every patient.
That's in part because no one else stepped up: Large test makers, burned before by past demands for unused and unsold Ebola and Zika virus tests, had no incentive to start making tests. And smaller academic and medical center labs were daunted by the paperwork requirements to validate tests: 240 pages' worth of patient testing data.
Facing what was now looking like an inescapable pandemic, the CDC's unreliable three-part test was scrapped. On Feb. 26, the agency gave public health labs permission to nix the contaminated N3 component from tests they had already received, and it began sending out kits with only N1 and N2. The N1 reagents were no longer throwing off false positives by this point.
On Feb. 29, the FDA finally gave them permission to use their own tests. "We should have been permitted to do testing in January," said Geoffrey Baird, a laboratory medicine expert at the University of Washington who reviewed the investigation notes for BuzzFeed News. "We weren't. We were waiting and had this laboratory-developed test ready, like everyone else who knew anything about this, the week after the Chinese published the sequence."
Trump visited the CDC on March 6. Just a few hours before he'd arrived, the HHS investigators ended their three days of interviews with lab personnel. But with the cameras rolling at CDC, Trump falsely promised that "anybody that wants a test can get a test."
In reality, only about 2,000 tests were performed on that date. Meanwhile, the country fell into uncontrolled spread of the virus.
The fact that the CDC was the only group in the US responsible for making tests made the failure even more consequential, Baird said. But he argued that the wider lack of tests wasn't the CDC's fault. Instead, he blamed the FDA, which held on to a bureaucratic EUA process that stymied fast action in the face of a public health emergency. "There was a feeling this wasn't going to be a major outbreak early on," a CDC lab official told BuzzFeed News, saying that senior leaders didn't do enough to encourage industrial test manufacturers to mobilize.
why would i want to read it in full? you're the one that asked for an account of what happened. I dont care if the US screwed up a bit and you think we are all stupid.
We had a lot going for us - large island country - easy to lock the doors. Smallish population. Only 8 states and 4 of them are geographically isolated. But the big advantage was no playing politics. There was essentially unity of purpose despite Some of the State Premiers being from the "other side" of politics to the Federal leader and the leader of my State of NSW. That said yesterday's Federal election has seen the "slightly more right" party that led through the pandemic lose to the "slightly more left" party. That swing is probably a reaction against the firm management of the pandemic with a touch of typically Australian "let's change - tho I don't know why" We've seen that happen on a previous occasion when the election campaign ran on a theme "It's time for a change".
External Quote:Objective To estimate the direct and indirect effects of the covid-19 pandemic on mortality in 2020 in 29 high income countries with reliable and complete age and sex disaggregated mortality data. Design Time series study of high income countries. Setting Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic...
www.bmj.com
University of Oxford, set out to estimate the direct and indirect effects of the covid-19 pandemic on mortality in 2020 in 29 high income countries.
The five countries with the highest absolute number of excess deaths were the US (458,000), the UK (94,400), Italy (89,100), Spain (84,100), and Poland (60,100). New Zealand had lower overall deaths than expected (−2,500). All countries experienced excess deaths in 2020, except New Zealand, Norway, and Denmark.
I'm surprised to see France rank that low given the headlines. Comparison data from euromomo.eu :
I think statistics need to be taken with a grain of salt when there are so many confounding factors. i can only speak to the American results, but the differences between locations can be enormous. Some places implemented strict mask requirements, some did not; those rules came and went in different states at different times, making a national statistic highly suspect. Some state populations have a strong aversion to vaccines, some do not. Single events have occasionally been labeled "Super-spreaders": a huge mask-free motorcycle rally caused a statistical bump in cases that spread throughout the country as attendees traveled home to different states, although the actual number of cases can only be estimated.
random fluctuations? bonus because some of the older vulnerable people who died earlier in the pandemic aren't dying now? "the best" isn't that much better than everyone else, at any rate.
Article: 
External Quote:
Thanks. I'm still on the learning curve.
Article: Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House COVID-19 coordinator under President Donald Trump, told House lawmakers she was asked to withhold or change information on weekly pandemic data reports sent to state and local health officials, including guidance on masks.
Birx, appearing Thursday before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis to discuss the Trump administration's pandemic response for the first time since she left in January 2021, [...]
Birx also discussed theories promoted by Dr. Scott Atlas, a COVID adviser to Trump who supported herd immunity as a strategy to fight the pandemic. [..]
"When you no longer agree on what is actually happening in the country and what needs to be done, and there's not consensus on that, then you lose the ability to execute in the maximum efficient and effective way," Birx continued.
Asked if more lives would have been saved if the president had followed her recommendations instead of those coming from Atlas, Birx replied "absolutely."
Looking at the figures from Johns Hopkins however, with a 7-day rolling average of less than 20,000, would seem to give a very different total:External Quote:
Isn't this just the difference between the ONS estimate, based on a random sample of the population, and the data from government health departments, based on all people testing positive? They both show an increase of about one-third over the previous week, but the actual totals are different due to the different sources. The health department figures depend not only on the rate of infection in the population but on the numbers of people being tested. Except for people tested in hospitals and other institutional settings, these are presumably mainly people who feel sick enough to want to get tested and go through the hassle involved. (Some people may also need to get tested for work reasons.) I don't know the exact rules, but it is more difficult now (than last year) to get free lateral flow test packs. I got a free pack of 7 test kits just before Christmas, I used one (negative) some time in January when I had heavyish cold symptoms, and another three, at weekly intervals, in May (positive, positive, negative) when I had some flu-like symptoms which did indeed prove to be Covid. But even at worst it was not terrible, and I'm sure I wouldn't have bothered getting tested if I didn't already have some test kits left. The difference between 2.3 million and only about 200,000 (assuming 20,000 new cases per day, lasting on average 10 days) is indeed large, but the ONS estimates have always been higher than reported case numbers. I don't know if the difference has widened, but if it has, this could be due to the combination of (a) the disease is actually inherently milder than it originally was, (b) more people have high immunity due to vaccination and/or prior infection, and (c) lower numbers being tested, due to milder symptoms and greater hassle and cost of testing.
That's false.it's interesting she said nothing derogatory about the covid response under Biden
Thirdly, this is a committee which I assume has Republican members who might have asked her about the Biden administration. Unfortunately, I haven't found a usable transcript, the CSPAN transcript keeps wanting to scroll away.External Quote:
yea, they did.
how do you know, and what did Birx say?
because i watched it. (edit: well technically i listened to it as i was working on a project)
if i wanted to bash on the biden administration (vs say germany or switzerland or the netherlands or greece etc) i would have done so for the last year and a half. if you want to know what she said then watch the testimony.
External Quote:
Presumably, the case rate paradoxon is because people more likely to be exposed are quicker to get boosted.
A month later: "Told you so" ;-)
Article: 
Article: 
As a very subjective reading of the culture of the general Populus around my part of Regional NSW. Many are still content to wear masks tho I doubt if there is any realistic assessment of benefit either way - simply "Best to be careful" OR "let's do the right thing". BUT I suspect that many are going traditional Aussie "OK, we are stuck with it, shit happens, let's get on with life". And that would lead to a pragmatic "let's not report it or make a big fuss unless we have to. I'll look surprised and innocent if I end up before a medico and a confirming diagnosis".
of course it could, but I see no indication that it is
or because those that felt they don't need a booster (as they are younger and healthier), don't go for official tests when they get omnicron as their symptoms aren't severe enough to warrant it.
