More late night random musings...
The advancement of technology is great and all, but more on as far as “social distancing” goes, did we really need anything “in the big scheme of things” to make us any more of a “robotic society”, more glued to our phones and computers than we already are, some having to possibly
mandatorily study and work from home exclusively with no other choice?
Seriously, the art of face to face human conversation...yeah I know people can “FaceTime” and all...I’m sure going to miss happy hour.
Sigh...
Going back to the other thread now, I’m still only about half way through, grrr. No wonder I have text neck.
And if we are going to be even
more glued to all our devices, then maybe we really need to start thinking more about this “text neck” business, lol. Ergonomics, all that stuff. Seriously. My neck can’t take it anymore.
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More on this
test kit business (pull hair); again, sorry for any rehash/repeat but it’s really important for all of us in the US to have this all very straight moving forward, imo:
“Our next question comes from Sheila Kaplan. Your line is open.
… what the contaminant was that was found in the test kits, please.
Sheila, we could not hear the first part of your question. Please repeat.
Can you please tell us what the contaminant was that was found in the original CDC test kits?
Messonnier: So i think you’re talking about a report in AXIOS that attributed some issues with the CDC test kits to a contaminant. What I can say about that is contamination is one possible explanation but there are others. And I can’t really comment on what is an ongoing investigation. Our focus is on moving forward. That is on making sure that the test kits we are sending out now are well done and making sure that our state and local health department partners have access to the full resources of CDC to diagnose cases.
Next question, please.
Our next question comes from John Bonnefield with CNN. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Can you explain to us why CDC isn’t somehow aggregating the testing that’s being done by public health labs to provide a national figure for the number of tests that are being conducted and on the number of PUIs? Right now, what I’m inferring is there’s not going to be any kind of national figure and that’s very different than what we have been seeing from places like South Korea where they’ve been routinely updating on a national level? Are you not asking public health labs to communicate this information to you or is there really no way for us to expect a national figure at all?
Messonnier: I’m sorry and I’m really glad you asked that question so I can correct that misunderstanding. Of course we will be aggregating data on a daily basis and will have daily case counts up on our website. What I meant to comment on is that sometimes our numbers come up on our website by noon but when there’s a case that’s reported from a state at 5:00, we don’t go back and reupdate our numbers. It waits until the next day. We update your numbers everyday. We are certainly going to be aggregating national numbers. We are certainly going to be providing a national and state specific picture of what’s going on, but sometimes you all in the media are covering individual cases that are being reported that aren’t on our counts yet because we’re, again, we’re updating them only once a day. It’s just otherwise really difficult to continue to update the numbers when basically cases are getting confirmed and reported all night long. So, definitely going to be providing national data and state level data. But if you see, for example, a news report from the state that’s coming out in half an hour, we’re not going to go back and reupdate the numbers that came up on CDC’s website at noon. Does that help? Okay. I’m hoping that helps.
Okay. Last question, please.
Our final question comes from Mike Stobbe with the Associated Press. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you for taking my call. Many things I want to ask but I’ll just ask two. In reference to your response to Sheila Kaplan’s question, I take it from your response that there’s an investigation going on and that you haven’t established what the problem was with the reagent in the kits. Is that what you’re saying? Or do you know what the problem was? And the second question, if I may, as you know over the weekend researchers at Fred Huchinson Cancer Center in the University of Washington said they had done a study that had suggested that the virus was circulating for weeks in Washington and perhaps that was related to the lack of availability of tests or the testing criteria it suggests that the spread of the virus may have been worse because of some of the policies or availability of test kits that were in place based on federal decisions. So, could you speak to that? Thank you.
Messonnier: Sure. So, in reference to the first question, you know, clearly it’s a priority at CDC and every level of our organization to make sure that our state and local health department, public health labs have access to the best tools possible. And our focus right now is moving forward to make sure that the test kits that they’re getting from us meet the high quality standards that we and FDA hold ourselves to and we are very confident in the kits that are being sent out now. There will be time in the future, I think, to look back and think about what we — what happened when, but our focus today is on — is how we’re moving forward. The second question is, is a really intense question. Researchers in Seattle were looking at the genetic sequencing of the strains that have been in Seattle and having an interesting hypothesis of how transmission might have worked. What I would say is that it’s really interesting finding and interesting research. There are alternate hypothesis for the same finding, for example, the sequences of the most recent strains coming out of Seattle actually also I understand match strains that were identified from later in the outbreak from China. So I think this is another place where I’m happy to see so much research going on, but I still think that it’s in the hypothesis phase and we’ll need to wait for more data to come in to really fully understand how valid that hypothesis is and how to interpret it. I’m really happy that researchers all around the country and all around the world are doing this kind of work because we’re clearly going to learn a lot from it.”
Source / Tuesday March 3 CDC Telebriefing
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*Previous “testing kit” reference quotes re: both the CDC and FDA Parts 1,2,3
here.
(*Tagging “test kits”, “testing kits”, “CDC”, “FDA”)
