In Covid in the Nursing Homes, Alex Tabarrok and I … document how, instead of encouraging private test suppliers to enter the market, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first botched the creation of their own test, then prohibited private actors from using it, and when, on top of that, the Food and Drug Administration broke long-standing practice and issued an “emergency requirement” that lab-developed tests be pre-approved, the result inevitably was very limited testing. These cascading errors meant that by the time a facility had a positive test, the virus would already have spread throughout the facility, contributing to COVID’s devastation of nursing homes, especially in the early stages of the pandemic.
