Somewhere around April I think, the urgent care clinic I work at was told by the CDC to send in fewer tests. You're overwhelming the lab, we were told. Only test people who meet strict criteria. At the time I thought this was just incompetence. Now I'm not sure.

For a long time the criteria included "you can only test people who've been in contact with someone who tested positive," which for an infection that can often be asymptomatic, is obviously nonsensical. I thought this was mere incompetence, too.

I'm not putting all this on Trump. Like, fuck that guy, certainly, but he's not an evil wizard. The effort to "save the economy" by pretending nothing was wrong had to have been large and collaborative.

And here we are today, in this, uh... saved economy.

(btw this thread isn't agreeing with blaming the CDC, I think they were trying in good faith to ration a tiny number of test kits. They're just the ones we heard from, it's not like someone higher in the admin emailed us going "mwa ha ha we're hiding your tests.")