I think the cdc dropped the ball here. I suspect a flu strain test was much easier to access, and not screw up than a new virus. Also the virus started in China, and the CDC put out guidelines originality that only those that traveled should be tested. People were calling the cdc wanted to be tested, being denied, because they didn’t meet their expectations of it being possible. If the head of the cdc would have said in February, we have a real problem, our tests kits are flawed, they don’t work, it will takes weeks to sort out, and we should be testing people matching symptoms now, I think the problem would have gotten fixed much sooner.

From article:
“Here’s where the trouble started. The CDC started sending out test kits to laboratories the first week of February, a month after China announced the outbreak. But the health agency quickly encountered a problem.

Some labs reported to the CDC that some of the test kits were delivering inconclusive results during verification. It’s believed that one of the chemicals used to conduct the test was not working properly and needed to be remanufactured.

“I’m very puzzled by what’s happened. The CDC did a really good job with H1N1 and Zika in exactly this thing: sending out huge quantities of test kits very rapidly to every state in the US and more than 100 countries around the world,” Tom Frieden