Flutterby™! : COVID-19 of the morning

U.S. Shows Willingness to Remove Tariffs on Medical Supplies

USTR said the comment period will run until June 25 and won’t replace the process to request exclusions from the tariffs. Comments submitted “are limited to comments on products subject to the tariff actions and relevant to the medical response to the coronavirus,” the USTR said.

So June 25th, while in the mean-time I'm being asked to donate any unopened boxes of gloves and N95 masks to local hospitals that fucked up their inventory flow. Hmmm.

Some good stuff in this: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming — Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.

Now that we've missed the opportunity for early testing, is it too late for testing to make a difference?

Absolutely not. Tests would make a measurable difference. We should be doing a stochastic process random probability sample of the country to find out where the hell the virus really is. Because we don't know. Maybe Mississippi is reporting no cases because it's not looking. How would they know? Zimbabwe reports zero cases because they don't have testing capability, not because they don't have the virus. We need something that looks like a home pregnancy test, that you can do at home.