It's a long article that doesn't lend itself well to copy-and-pasting. I'll try summarize it as objectively as I can, and other folks can weigh in to correct me if they feel that I'm getting it wrong.
Basically, people who know what they're doing -- experts at the CDC, FDA, research universities, commercial labs, etc. -- all knew back in early January that we needed to develop a test for covid-19. But the US completely and totally lost six weeks of time because of a combination of three issues. First, the FDA committed pretty strongly to a test designed by the CDC, which put all our proverbial eggs in one basket. That might have worked out okay but for the second major failure, which was that CDC test didn't work. Finally, the declaration of public heath emergency actually increased the hurdles involved in developing tests because policy in this area is very badly written. The result of all of this is that the US ended up way behind where it needed to be when it comes to testing.
I have lots of thoughts on this issue, but I'm going to leave them out of this post because I don't want to muddle a basic summary of the article with my own analysis.