US mistakes helped coronavirus spread ‘beyond nation’s ability to detect it’, public health experts warn
- Report in Journal of American Medical Association says limits on number of people tested and problems with equipment hampered fight against Covid-19
- White House has been on the defensive over its handling of the epidemic after accusing China of leaving it ‘behind the curve’
Public health specialists have blamed early missteps and delays for helping Covid-19 to spread undetected in the United States as the White House scrambled to justify its response to the epidemic following its criticisms of Beijing’s response.
A report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Monday warned that limiting diagnostic tests to a narrow group of people and problems with the test kits had left the US with “minimal diagnostic capacity during the first few weeks of the epidemic”.
“In the early stages, Covid-19 has spread beyond the nation’s ability to detect it,” they wrote.
The report said early Centres for Disease Control (CDC) test kits produced inconclusive or invalid results for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, because the negative control failed.
State laboratories also encountered difficulty verifying the results, said the report by Joshua Sharfstein from Johns Hopkins University, Scott Becker from the Association of Public Health Laboratories in Maryland and Michelle Mello from Stanford University.