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Another explanation for the COVID-19 testing backlog in California — hospitals & clinics are using slower, bottlenecked testing pipelines instead of fast academic labs that have capacity to spare https://twitter.com/amymaxmen/status/1248291539144474626
This is quite a quote that @amymaxmen got from a UC Berkeley scientist who runs a testing lab: "I don’t want to be disparaging, but the people who made the CDC kit simply failed at molecular biology — they created a nightmare.” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01068-3
OMG this Berkeley guy. "The business of American medicine and the way it is organized is astonishingly unprepared for this… I show up in a magic ship, with 20,000 free kits… and the major hospitals say: ‘Go away, we cannot interface with you.’” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01068-3
So, to sum up: There's a guy at UC Berkeley who had 20,000 free test kits to offer, and the only taker he could find in the Bay Area was a nonprofit org that tests homeless people??? Meanwhile, counties are rationing their tests & don’t have enough for nursing homes w/ outbreaks.
This is great reporting and gives a really astonishing and granular picture of the banal day-to-day procedural stuff that is going wrong in the testing chain. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01068-3
