The CDC screwing up wouldn't have been so bad without the FDA. I'm just going to quote Scott Alexander here[1] (supporting links in original):

"No problem so bad overregulation can’t make it worse:

So far the government has bungled its coronavirus response pretty egregiously.

Most hospitals have the equipment in house to detect coronavirus. But the FDA banned them from using it. They said all coronavirus tests needed FDA approval, and refused to approve anything except the official test made by the CDC.

Unfortunately, the official CDC test was defective. The test itself worked, but one component in the test kit was broken. Most hospitals had their own supply of this component and could have substituted it in, but the way the FDA approved the CDC test banned them from doing this.

The CDC tried as hard as it could to fix their broken tests quickly, but they weren’t able to do it fast enough to satisfy demand. In order to ration the scarce tests, they mandated that hospitals only test people who had recently been to China, or been in close contact with someone who had.

This was a disaster. For example, here’s a story from a person who traveled to Japan, where the coronavirus is active. He came back to the US, started developing symptoms, and went to a hospital. The hospital said since he hadn’t been to China, they couldn’t test him, and sent him home (he voluntarily quarantined after discharge, so thanks).

But even worse, the policy ruled out by fiat ever being able to detect when the epidemic spread to the US. So in mid-February, when a patient with no history of travel to China came to a hospital in California with coronavirus symptoms, the doctors had to ask the CDC for special permission to test. The CDC dithered for four days before granting the permission, during which nobody put any work into containing the disease. Finally the test came back positive – after some health workers had already been infected.

There were many points where this could have been avoided. A better CDC could have made tests that worked from the beginning, or ramped up production of working tests faster, or come up with smarter criteria for rationing tests. But it would have been even better to have a system where things don’t have to go perfectly, and where a few mistakes don’t choke up the entire response to an epidemic for weeks. If we hadn’t let our culture reach the point where governments ban things by default and review at leisure, and where individual iniative is frowned upon in favor of waiting for official permission to do the right thing, we could have recovered from all of these mistakes. Hospitals would have used their existing tests which they already have more than enough of, doctors would have had permission to test suspicious cases at their discretion, and we would have had a chance to catch infections early before they could spread. If the government didn’t already regulate adrenaline, buspirone, insulin, and genetic testing to the point of near-unavailability, maybe people would have thought it was weirder, or raised more of a fuss, when they started doing it for coronavirus tests.

If you don’t trust me, trust former FDA director Scott Gottleib, who explains the situation here in an unusually candid communication from an ex-government official talking about his former agency. His Twitter feed is a great source of information in general.

And here’s a more careful analysis of some of the laws around diagnostic testing and how they contributed to the current crisis. And by more careful, I mean it ends with “Bottom line: the FDA is going to kill us all”."

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/02/coronavirus-links-spec...