Oh no, not this again. There's been a long-running propaganda campaign to convince Americans that the CDC and their government has failed them because they can't achieve a supposedly easy level of Covid-19 testing which is in reality an order of magnitude beyond what any other major country has managed, and that that this is a uniquely American failure. The NYT opinion piece this is based on looks like it's in part a continuation of that.<p>It's gone hand in hand with a narrative that the US is behind the rest of the world in its level of Covid-19 testing, when in fact it's ahead of almost everyone else. (Last I looked, this trick was being pulled off by comparing based on the number of tests per positive, even though this is really a measure of outbreak size rather than testing levels if you're trying to test everyone with symptoms - unless the outbreak has hit catestropic levels, the number of tests required to do that is basically independent of the number of cases. Clearly it has absolutely nothing to do with how close a country is to being able to test a particular proportion of the population on a regular basis regardless of symptoms.)