Wuhan accumulated the most protective equipment since everything was shipped there during the outbreak. Now that everything is under control and numbers dropping, it is not surprising the inventory needs to get redistributed to places that can use them. If you are worried about contamination, here is a recent study by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health that shows how long the virus can stay infectious on different surfaces.
If you need to be worried, it is local packages that you should be worried about as the ship time is much quicker and chances of active virus remaining on surfaces are much higher.
Also we really don’t know how many cases there are in the US as our CDC only officially allowed testing starting at the end of the last week of February. Therefore the REPORTED NUMBERS WE SEE ARE MEANINGLESS due to lack of testing all along.
Even CDC director Robert Redfield admitted that the US had deaths from COVID-19 before they were able to test for it and even now test kits for the virus are in great shortage and people requesting to be tested for it has been denied. Therefore there’s no way we can tell if the assumed flu patients in the past few months are actually COVID-19 patients. This is unacceptable considering even a small country like S. Korea is testing 15,000 a day.
Besides mind boggling low number of tests performed in the US, there is also severe sampling bias that muddles our understanding of the origin of the virus and how it has been transmitting around to devise containment strategies. The US CDC’s extremely narrow criteria for testing basically requires persons with direct travel to China or direct contact with a known COVID-19 patient (which rules out almost everyone) to even be considered for testing. Only when local testers do not follow the CDC guideline completely can anyone even have a chance to be tested.
Even right now after President Trump announced that anyone who wants a test can get a test, it is still near impossible to get tested for COVID-19
Even after CDC started allowing testing this month, most places like LA County is “NOT PLANNING TO TEST PATIENTS who have the symptoms but are otherwise healthy enough to be sent home to self-quarantine”
The governor of Ohio made a statement a few days ago that he estimates 100,000 infections in Ohio went undiagnosed due to lack of test kits and he said other states are in the same situation. Though this number is not scientifically confirmed and I think it is highly exaggerated, but even if the actual number is only 1/10 of that, the total undetected infections in the country would be more than the world total currently reported.
I really hope CDC will revise the criteria for testing to make it less impossible to meet and also local hospitals and testing centers will ramp up testing so we can have a better understanding of the situation and pinpoint outbreak clusters. But my point here is that we are far underestimating the situation due to lack of data so I recommend we stay cautious.