“Nurses and doctors in the emergency room are on the front lines, and they’re having to fight with bureaucracy to get a test,” said the president of the union for nurses and doctors at Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital.

In Boston, a 32-year-old woman spent five hours in the emergency department as doctors tried to get a test for her—she lives near the location of the Biogen meeting that spread the disease to dozens of people, and had severe shortness of breath.

"We are being crippled by our department of public health and the CDC on our ability to combat this pandemic,” one Boston doctor told CNN, calling the situation “insanity.”

This is the reality: There are not enough tests, and the CDC’s standards for who should be tested basically ignore the possibility of community transmission.

After weeks of trying to stay close enough to the Trump message to stay out of trouble, Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, went off-message. ”The system is not really geared to what we need right now, what you are asking for. That is a failing,” he told the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Thursday. “It is a failing. I mean, let’s admit it.”

”The idea of anybody getting it easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we are not,” he added.

We can only look at other countries, like Italy, and guess how bad it will be. Those guesses are based on pitifully inadequate information about what’s going on in the United States right now, last week, last month, because Donald Trump did not want to admit there was a problem he hadn’t solved by limiting travel from China.