Miscalculation at every level left U.S. unequipped to fight coronavirus
I still remember how when the pandemic was breaking out, I and my colleagues in the lab were not taking this seriously because we were so confident we&#x27;d be able to get it under control. All we had to do was test rigorously, and, like c&#x27;mon. It&#x27;s just qPCR. I remember overconfidently asserting that, like, the USA <i>invented</i> PCR - we know how to do it. laugh out loud. Hell, I had a plate in the machine as I was speaking! Colleagues agreed. After all, it only got so bad in china because they were covering it up, right? We just gotta run more tests, trace, and isolate. The stuff we were working on the lab was hard fundamental questions - the science needed to stop the pandemic was some PCR and quarantining people. And, the CDC was developing our own diagnostic instead of using the WHO&#x27;s, but that makes sense, they&#x27;re the CDC. What were the odds that they&#x27;d screw up so badly that the FDA would describe conditions as so bad they&#x27;d be reason enough to shut down the lab if they weren&#x27;t the CDC? What were the odds that our friends in testing labs would find themselves describing the CDC as having &quot;simply failed at molecular biology&quot; [0]?<p>Of course, I use the past tense when describing our feelings about our research since we&#x27;re certainly not working on it now. It&#x27;s all nonessential. We&#x27;re not allowed to go to the lab now unless you really need to water the plants or feed the mice. Just to keep a sustaining gene pool of our model organisms alive, so we can breed back what we need when we get back.<p>We really learned a lesson in humility. Part of miscalculating is having the wrong set of assumptions to derive calculations from. I don&#x27;t think we were the only people who should have known better that were arrogant and overconfident.<p>We&#x27;re hearing from some local labs that they have enough reagents to run tests, they have the right primers, they have what they need. But they can&#x27;t get the cotton swabs they shove all the way up your nose and the little plastic collection things they need to administer the test. Cotton swabs. And little plastic vials.<p>We&#x27;re talking about developing a vaccine, a cure, privacy-respecting contact tracing, fighting a once in a generation pandemic, keeping the hospital system from being overwhelmed. And we don&#x27;t have the cheap disposable plastic and cotton things we need to run a test.<p>Truly a lesson in humility.<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-020-01068-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nature.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;d41586-020-01068-3</a>