What Went Wrong with Coronavirus Testing in the U.S.

When they get nervous, people want to see centralised control protecting them. I'm the same. But we have pretty solid evidence that distributed market systems can react much more quickly and comprehensively than a centralised body. Parellelise the response, essentially.

In this case, there was a crisis. Control was centralised into a system that statistically has to be supremely fault tolerant to work. The system wasn't especially fault tolerant and didn't work. There is no need to centralise control in a crisis, centralising information is what matters. If the CDC had a register of which tests it supported and let the market be a little bit confused then the situation in the US would be substantially better now.

Turns out a bit of nervousness was warranted. Extremely sarcastic well done to the people at the CDC who successfully kept everyone going on with their lives as normal while they found their feet.

1. A technical messup led to the orginal batch of CDC tests being bad. This seems unavoidable. Stuff happens.

2. A bureaucratic disaster in HHS led to delays trying to get private tests certified. This will forever be fodder for conspiracy arguments, as both the HHS secretary and president were issuing statements at the time pointing to low positive test counts as evidence for the virus not being serious.