On February 5th, sixteen days after a Seattle resident who had visited relatives in Wuhan, China, was diagnosed as having the first confirmed case of covid-19 in the United States, the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, began sending diagnostic tests to a network of about a hundred state, city, and county public-health laboratories . Up to that point, all testing for covid-19 in the U.S. had been done at the C.D.C.; of some five hundred suspected cases tested at the Centers, twelve had confirmed positive. The new test kits would allow about fifty thousand patients to be tested, and they would also make testing much faster, as patient specimens would no longer have to be sent to Atlanta to be evaluated.
Image: In February, as a first set of covid-19 test kits sent out by the Centers for Disease Control failed to work properly, labs around the country scrambled to fill the void.Photograph Courtesy the C.D.C.
