An interesting thing @desmondbutler and I reported here: FEMA cut off testing supplies to King County after it declined to send tests to CDC labs that took up to 5 days longer to process. County officials believe their rejection of FEMA’s patient ID requirement was also a factor. https://twitter.com/robertklemko/status/1248594906324574208

1st time I’ve had to email a fed agency for comment, and it was... weird. I’ve had NFL teams bend the truth in their responses. And police depts aren’t super reliable. But I’ve never had a spokesperson send me an easily and immediately disprovable statement, until last week.

We asked FEMA if they required ID and personal info to test, something that worried county officials who did not undocumented persons to fear getting tested. We had the letter FEMA sent King County that says patients “must bring” ID.

A FEMA spokesperson got back to us from a generic agency account, with no name attached to it, saying that wasn’t a requirement. I sent them a quote from the letter and asked them to reconcile it, and then they followed up with an email that completely ignored the question.

Ultimately they sent just 4,000 tests to the county, which was expecting 10k (FEMA says it only planned to send 8k). University of Washington labs were turning tests around in 48 hours, immensely valuable to a county trying to keep first responders in action.

But FEMA is on the record telling us they withheld remaining kits because King County refused to fedex the completed test kits to labs across the country that could take up to 7 days to send back results.

The director “couldn’t endorse” a testing site that didn’t follow their protocol, they said. This is just one episode. I imagine over the next few months we will get a full picture of all the hurdles communities were put through by federal agencies at the height of a pandemic.