Human testing should have been done for the dairy virus

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/leana-wen-bird-flu-testing-h5n1-virus-face-the-nation/
I am not the only one that understands what should have been happening since day one.  The tragic thing is that the CDC never wanted to do the right thing.
QUOTE:
Dr. Leana Wen said Sunday that the lack of testing for bird flu doesn't mean that the virus isn't alive in humans, and that she feels the federal government "should have learned our lesson from COVID" and should be proactive in making tests available for Americans — and not wait for labs to characterize the cases and their severity.
"I feel like we should have learned our lesson from COVID, that just because we aren't testing doesn't mean the virus isn't there," said Dr. Leana Wen, a former Baltimore health commissioner, on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan."
END QUOTE:
It should be noted that the CDC was initially for testing for Covid, but they screwed up, and instead of adopting working tests that other countries had already developed they made their own test that did not work.  This was a strike against the reliability of testing, and allowed the kooks to interfere with the testing and contact tracing that should have started early in the Covid Pandemic.
The CDC had a similar excuse for not starting testing and contact tracing with the Dairy virus.  Their test was unreliable again.  It consisted of two PCR tests, and one of the tests routinely failed making the test results suspect.  The CDC had to start assuring the people using the test that they could still rely on the one working test, but that they needed to verify the testing results with more testing.  It took the CDC months to fix this defect because they blamed the company that they had contracted to make the tests, and wanted the company to fix the mess.  They wasted months in squabbles with that company when all they needed to do was get another company to make a functional test.   So for around the first 5 months of the dairy epidemic we did not have a fully reliable test for the virus.
The CDC refused to start a dairy worker testing program even though they knew that the dairy workers were being infected from the first cases in Texas.  They wanted to deny that worker infections were significant even when poultry farms started to go down and it was very unlikely that they have had contact with anything but dairy workers.  The initial surveys in Michigan and Texas found out that over 20 percent of workers on infected dairies worked on other farms and that 7% of them also worked on poultry farms.
Back in early November when it was found that 7 to 10% of dairy workers had likely been infected in Colorado and Michigan by testing for antibodies the CDC finally claimed that they were going to start a worker testing program in order to detect the infected and give them antivirals to reduce the virus production in them and reduce the chance of the virus mutating.  Nothing has come of that claim and no results have been put out for what the CDC actually ended up doing, which seems to be nothing.  It has been 2 months of nothing.
It looks like we have been very lucky with the dairy virus H5N1 genotype B3.13.  It seems to have a limited infection range in terms of tissue. It can infect the gut, mammary glands and apparently tear ducts, but it is not a respiratory infection.  The mutations to better infect humans do not seem to be selected for among virus infecting those tissues.  If we had been dealing with genotype D1.1 that has infected two humams (one in British Columbia and the other in Louisiana) we would likely already be dealing with a tragically severe pandemic.  D1.1 does infect respiratory tissue, and the mutations needed to better infect humans have occurred in both human cases making these patients severely ill. This indicates that the mutations needed to make it a pandemic virus commonly occur, and can be selected for in the certain tissues that the virus propagates in.  The teenager in Canada was in critical condition at one point, and the Lousiana patient is in the ICU.  In both cases the wild bird virus did not have the needed mutations, but they likely occurred during the infection of both patients.  So it looks like the CDC's ass has been saved by the biology of the dairy virus.  My guess is that the mutations that we worry about are selected against in the human and cattle tissues that the Dairy virus can infect at this time.
This should not absolve the CDC and USDA from not dealing with the dairy epidemic as it should have been dealt with.  The USDA should have been testing all the dairies from day one.  They likely would have prevented many herd infections and many fewer poultry flocks would have gone down with the dairy virus, and most importantly many fewer dairy and poultry workers would have been infected.
https://www.michiganfarmnews.com/usda-releases-findings-of-investigation-into-hpai-spread-in-michigan
This was a June news release.
QUOTE:
So how did it spread?
Apart from the potential for resident wild birds or peri-domestic species to move and transmit the virus, APHIS reported that the only other potential transmission routes found from dairy herds to the poultry flocks were through shared employment, housing, or movement of employees.
Investigators found that approximately 22 employees of three poultry flocks worked weekend shifts at two different dairy premises. Shared housing between dairy and poultry workers was also identified between three poultry premises and two dairy premises, with APHIS noting that dairy and poultry employees have social contact too.
END QUOTE:
QUOTE:
According to APHIS, key findings identified to date and potential risk factors for local transmission included:
Shared personnel between premises
20% of affected dairies’ employees and 7% of dairies’ employees family members work on other dairy premises
END QUOTE:
This is why I came up with my estimate that infection of 5% dairy worker could account for the spread of the virus to states that did not get cattle and to poultry farms that obviously could not have cattle contact.
I was agitating the USDA that dairy workers were taking the virus to poultry farms before I retired in May.  The USDA verified that this was the case by June, but still did nothing to try to prevent further poultry flock infections.
Back in June the USDA and CDC understood that dairy workers were taking the virus to other dairies and poultry farms, but never started testing all the dairies, nor testing dairy workers.
California confirmed this mode of spread by their contact tracing, and they still did not do what should have been done.  Instead of quarantining dairy workers to one farm they allowed voluntary restrictions that obviously did not work.
3 infected poultry workers migrated from Washington to Oregon and were identified, confirmed to be infected, and sent back to Washington, but infected workers have been going to other states from the start of the infection.  There has been no restrictions on their movements because the USDA and CDC refuse to identify all the infected herds, nor test the workers, so they don't even know which workers have to have their movements restricted.
Ron Okimoto