'Vital and urgent': Inside New York City's difficult quest to obtain coronavirus testing kits
New York City Deputy Mayor Raul Perea-Henze was worried about obtaining testing kits for the new coronavirus as the disease started ravaging the United States. His letters to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed it.
He wrote the first on Feb. 2, just 12 days after the first confirmed U.S. case of COVID-19 had been detected in Washington state. By then, there were just eight confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States, yet no deaths.
Perea-Henze, who oversees New York City's health services, was among the experts who realized that total reflected the low number of patients who had been tested. There were countless other cases that hadn't been detected.
The Mexico-trained physician and former assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs practically pleaded for test kits from the CDC, the nation's leading public health institute.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/vital-and-urgent-inside-new-york-citys-difficult-quest-to-obtain-coronavirus-testing-kits/ar-BB11uEGu?li=BBnb4R7&ocid=hplocalnews