iVolve

CDC's Infectious Disease Testing Had a Major Coronavirus-sized Loophole

  1. CDC's Unexplained Respiratory Disease Outbreak Guidance Provide's sensible guidance for HOW to investigate "Unexplained Respiratory Disease". The loophole is CDC never properly guides WHEN to investigate.
  2. CDC's Influenza Virus Testing Guidelines
  3. CDC's Guidance for When to Consider Influenza Testing

CDC's guidance eliminates testing of ALL patients who are not considered high-risk.

Following the left-hand most "No" branch:

Is the [influenza symptomatic] patient being admitted to the hospital? No Will influenza testing influence clinical management? No Influenza clinically diagosed; start empirical antiviral treatment if the patient is in a high-risk group for influenza complications...

  1. COV Surveillance

There were limitations to this report. NREVSS is a passive, voluntary surveillance system, collecting results from specimens submitted to U.S. laboratories. Many HCoV infections are subclinical or mild, and do not require clinical care; therefore these infections are unlikely to require laboratory testing and would not be captured by NREVSS.

  1. Lancet's Coronavirus Resources
  2. The Cell's Coronavirus
  3. Elsevier's Coronavirus
  4. Lancet - Clinical Features of 1st Coronavirus Patients

Following the pneumonia cases of unknown cause reported in Wuhan and considering the shared history of exposure to Huanan seafood market across the patients, an epidemiological alert was released by the local health authority on Dec 31, 2019, and the market was shut down on Jan 1, 2020. Meanwhile, 59 suspected cases with fever and dry cough were transferred to a designated hospital starting from Dec 31, 2019. An expert team of physicians, epidemiologists, virologists, and government officials was soon formed after the alert.

  1. More proof we have no idea how much Coronavirus has already spread

Dr. Robert “Chip” Schooley a UC San Diego infectious disease specialist and editor of the medical journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, noted that testing in the United States so far has been reserved mostly for those who have traveled to countries where COVID-19 outbreaks started months ago.

It will not be until significantly more people who have not traveled are tested that there will be a robust-enough measure of how broadly the disease has spread from person to person in communities, he said.

“We need to be in a situation where we have a larger number of people being tested for a wider variety of symptoms and that will begin to fill in the blanks about how much virus is actually circulating,” Schooley said.