updated 08-31-2020. 
“People are unable to find testing sites, and are avoiding treatment because they can’t afford it. Hospitalized Covid patients worry about their medical bills instead of their recovery.”
The Republican-Trump “fragmented U.S. health care system has hampered efforts to expand coronavirus testing, … traced to the botched rollout by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the tardy response by the Food and Drug Administration, and supply shortages of swabs and masks”
There was no panic during “Swine Flu-H1N1” outbreak. The Obama administration tested 1 million people for H1N1 in the first month after the first US diagnosed case. Over 50 days after the first US coronavirus case, the republicans have still kept testing down to less than 10,000 people! They are in charge, overruling the doctors and scientists, putting even more people at risk, calling it a hoax, blaming Democrats then China, lying to protect the stock market instead of people! typical Republicans – care more about $money -and their rich political benefactors- than the rest of us!
Even after infections spread to the United States, Trump continued to downplay the threat and showed concern with the effect widespread panic could have on the stock market. He was especially upset when CDC official Nancy Messonnier told reporters on February 25 that “disruption to everyday life might be severe” [store closings, empty shelves in grocery stores, millions suddenly unemployed!] as the virus worsened. At the time, only 14 Americans had been diagnosed with COVID-19. According to the Post, “Trump called Azar on his way back from a trip to India and complained that Messonnier was scaring the stock markets.” [it is clear that Rump’s concern is $money, not people!]
The US now has more than 19,000 confirmed cases.
Rather than take responsibly for their deadly missteps, in recent days, Trump and his deputies have targeted their ire at China [rather than admit that he has been] suppressing evidence of the outbreak in its early days and mishandling the response as it spread.
www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/03/washington-post-trump-virus
“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were – they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,”
Trump dragged his feet in January and February, even as “a majority of the intelligence reporting included in daily briefing papers” was about COVID-19.
Even after White House officials became more cognizant of the virus’s threat could pose to US health and safety – and Trump’s reelection chances – the president still showed minimal interest. In early February, days after then-acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney began holding meetings devoted to the coronavirus, Trump predicted the virus would go away by April and even praised Chinese President Xi Jinping’s response as “strong, sharp and powerfully focused.”
By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without federal government approval.
What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.
“It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.”
www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/us/coronavirus-testing-delays.html
March 12, 2020
Why It’s So Hard to Get Coronavirus Testing in the U.S. Right Now
When employees of Massachusetts biotech company Biogen were informed in late February that several among them had been diagnosed with COVID-19 after a company-wide meeting, they immediately went to hospitals for testing, but were turned away. … Two weeks later, 77 of Massachusetts’ 95 confirmed cases are Biogen employees!
Still, testing in the US lags far behind that in other countries, due to a combination of technical and policy issues, as well as political pressure.
When the CDC tried to expand testing by providing its test kits to state and local public health labs, there were problems with the initial version of the kits
That delay, along with the growing number of undetected cases in the U.S., prompted the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Feb. 29 to expand its approval criteria to allow any qualified lab to develop its own test. Two of the largest diagnostic commercial labs, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, have begun testing this week but are still conducting only a few thousand a day as they scale up capacity.
As of March 11, CDC, state and public health labs have conducted more than 11,000 tests since mid-January. By comparison, South Korea has tested more than 200,000 of its population of 51 million since January.
In the US, rollout of widespread testing is plagued by not only logistical issues but political over-promising and supply constraints. When the FDA expanded its approval criteria at the end of February, Republican agency commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn [the fourth chief of the agency this year already]. predicted that the policy would lead to enough test kits for more than a million [!?] people within a week; when that goal wasn’t met, White House Coronavirus Task Force point person Mike Pence was forced to extend the target date by a week as companies scrambled to familiarize themselves with the test and order the chemicals and reagents they needed.
another challenge for some labs involves extracting the virus from the sample. The COVID-19 test actually picks up fragments of genetic material of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the illness, in the form of RNA, so pulling the virus out of the sample is critical. “The kit that the CDC sends, for example, includes [testing chemicals] but what it doesn’t include is the extraction needed to pull out the viral RNA,” he says.
For Americans on the ground, this is all moving far too slowly.
There just simply aren’t enough tests to go around, and that’s terrifying to Satterfield and millions of other Americans.
“The lack of testing availability up to now scares the crap out of me,” she says.
time.com/5801790/coronavirus-testing-us/?utm_source=roundup&campaign=coronavirus
This is just another strain of the “flu”, and the big ones always seem to hit on election years. “Swine flu, Bird flu, Ebola, Sars, ETC……” Don’t make this good fuel efficiency site stupid by putting liberal politics into it.
All your “flu” comments are so far off, they are pointless -editor