“We really were... basically on a pause for a few weeks within the public health system,” according to the executive director of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “And meanwhile, the academic laboratories who had developed their own tests also were not able to test because the regulations didn't allow it at that time.”

”What we needed was extremely aggressive leadership at the CDC level and at the national level to say, okay, these are all our plans... I don't think there was really a realization of the magnitude of the problem,” the director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida told CNN.

”Our members were telling the CDC that we needed testing capacity for a public health surveillance because we felt that the virus might be circulating in the US as early as January and we should be testing for that now,” a COVID-19 adviser at the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists told CNN. But all the way up to Jan. 28, the official word from the CDC to state public health directors was that “the virus is not spreading in the U.S. at this time and CDC believes the immediate health risk from 2019-nCoV to the general American public is low.”

That statement could not be based on actual knowledge, though, because the CDC was not doing the testing needed to know if, or how much, or where the virus was spreading in the U.S. They simply did not have the information—while standing in the way of others getting it.

Non-CDC labs were told they had to go through a complicated Food and Drug Administration process, about which, in true ass-covering fashion, the FDA now says that “labs did not understand the FDA process and mistakenly believed there was more work involved, or just did not even realize that they could develop a test in the first place.” Except that researchers at the Seattle Flu Study were told not to test existing swabs originally gathered for tracking the flu, and when they started running the tests anyway, they were told to stop.

Here we have the Trump administration, which has specialized in knocking down life-saving government regulations, suddenly insisting that regulations preventing widespread testing be strictly adhered to as a life-threatening virus spread across the country undetected. When those Seattle Flu Study researchers were trying to decide what to do about the information they were uncovering, they had to conclude that “every once in a while, the ethics and the regulations don't match up,” as the head of the Institutional Review Board at the University of Washington told CNN.

Screw-up after screw-up got us here, and testing remains an ongoing failure by the Trump administration—so rather than admit the screw-ups and try to expand testing enough to have a prayer of clamping down on the spread of the virus, Trump has decided to declare it “not necessary.” And that ass-covering mentality right there is part of why we’re in so much trouble now.