US mistakes helped coronavirus spread ‘beyond nation’s ability to detect it’, public health experts warn

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Public health specialists have blamed early missteps and delays for helping Covid-19 to spread undetected in the United States as the White House scrambled to justify its response to the epidemic following its criticisms of Beijing’s response.

A report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Monday warned that limiting diagnostic tests to a narrow group of people and problems with the test kits had left the US with “minimal diagnostic capacity during the first few weeks of the epidemic”.