At that moment there was essentially no COVID-19 testing inside the United States. The Food and Drug Administration was still insisting that state and local health officers wait for the test kits supplied by the CDC. And the CDC was still saying that the risk to Americans from the virus was very low. The entire country was dismissing what the redneck epidemiologist had glimpsed in Wuhan. The Japanese weren’t dismissing it, though. The Japanese were alert. They had their own labs and planned to use them to test everyone on board the cruise ship.
