To the editor:

The notion of Alexandria’s city hall taking the lead on coronavirus testing is frankly frightening. To prove why, we can start by going back through your past editorials chronicling a pattern of serious ethical, public engagement and competence failures.

Imagine the hash our city hall – which can’t even successfully recycle glass, purposefully prioritizes unused bicycle lanes over creating a traffic jam on a major arterial, has a school surrounded by half-million dollar homes lose accreditation and disappears a Metro station’s south entrance without telling anybody so that the public has to learn about it inadvertently from some concept drawing in a WMATA report – would make of coronavirus testing?

The city manager and other city staff make enormous salaries, but we don’t pay them enough to expect them to perform miracles.

The city manager has his hands full with an unanticipated fiscal crisis and running what’s left of day-to-day city business.

The Inova hospitals all have the highest 5 out of 5 rating from the Center for Medicare Services; they are excellent hospitals with high concentrations of the full range of health care professionals – far more than the small group of state- and municipal-level health regulators.

Individual and group practice physicians and health maintenance organizations like Kaiser which consume entire buildings and have all their patients’ records are far better suited to prioritize the limited number of test kits that can be deployed and analyzed than our city hall which, to its credit, understands that a catastrophe could result from putting it in charge of coronavirus testing.

-Dino Drudi, Alexandria