The Trump administration’s bungling of the coronavirus outbreak has left many medical professionals fuming, including an emergency room doctor at New York-Presbyterian Hospital who on Monday called the federal government’s slow response a “national scandal.”
The New York Times has published a lengthy report about how the Centers for Disease Control completely flubbed making its own coronavirus testing procedure, which has left doctors and hospitals without fast and reliable methods for diagnosing patients who may have the disease.
“Clearly, there have been problems with rolling out the test,” Dr. Thomas Frieden, former director of the CDC, tells the Times. “There are a lot of frustrated doctors and patients and health departments.”
Dr. Michael Mina, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, gave the Times an even harsher assessment about the Trump CDC’s performance so far.
“The incompetence has really exceeded what anyone would expect with the CDC,” he said. “This is not a difficult problem to solve in the world of viruses.”
Even as doctors clamor to have a fully functioning coronavirus test, the CDC has stopped answering the Times’ questions about the test’s development process, and the Times notes that “officials appeared to have removed figures on the agency website counting how many Americans had been tested.”