As President Trump pushes to reopen the economy, public health experts are sounding the alarm that doing so without a significant increase in testing and contact tracing capacity could lead to second and third waves of the coronavirus outbreak that could be even more deadly than the first.

 

The widespread testing shortages we’re facing could have been avoided if the Trump administration had taken early action to ramp up testing capacity. Instead, Trump chose to downplay the threat of the virus and failed to implement widespread screening, allowing COVID-19 to spread undetected for weeks in the US. Now, as Trump is moving to curb social distancing guidelines before experts say we’re ready, “[t]esting is just not his primary thought.”

 

Despite Trump’s abject failure to prepare the country for this public health crisis, Senator Susan Collins defended his early coronavirus response, saying that he “did a lot that was right in the beginning.” Now, as the president again ignores the advice of experts and threatens to put more Americans at risk, will Collins finally hold Trump accountable or will she keep making excuses?

 

CNBC: The US economy can’t reopen without widespread coronavirus testing. Getting there will take a lot of work and money

 

By Dan Mangan

April 16, 2020

 

  • As the United States reels from the massive economic fallout of the coronavirus outbreak, there are growing calls by President Donald Trump and others to start to reopen businesses, schools and other public spaces so that the nation can begin to recover financially.

 

  • But health experts and several top business leaders warn that the country — which might not see a coronavirus vaccine for 18 months or more — should not reopen on a broad scale unless there is a huge increase in the relatively small number of tests currently being done for Covid-19 infection.

 

  • Health experts also say the country needs a related and equally robust program to trace the people who have had contact with infected people, to avoid seeing those contacts themselves spread the coronavirus to others.

 

  • There are only about 120,000 samples or so being tested each day for the coronavirus in the United States, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Experts say that millions of people will have to be tested each day, even as many as 20 million to 30 million people, before the nation can return to a semblance of economic normality. That is much more than the number of tests even projected to be produced by some major manufacturers by June.

 

  • “To avoid a second wave of viral spread you have to do what South Korea and other countries, including Germany, have done. You have to have testing in place, and aggressive testing,” said Dr. Tom Moore, an infectious disease specialist in Wichita, Kansas.

 

  • Moore and other experts say that a second or third wave of Covid-19 infections could end up killing more people than the first wave, lead to another series of shutdowns of businesses, and ultimately end up doing greater economic damage than has been seen to date from the pandemic.

 

  • Trump himself this week said, “Our country has to get open, and it will get open, and it will get open safely and hopefully quickly. Some areas quicker than other areas.”

 

  • The president, who is running for reelection this fall, also claimed “there’s tremendous testing, and the governors will use whatever testing is necessary, and if they’re not satisfied with their testing, they shouldn’t open.” But Trump’s own leading infectious disease advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told the Associated Press in an interview Tuesday that the U.S. is “not there yet” in having enough testing capability or contact tracing systems in place to rely on for reopening the economy.

 

  • Complicating the effort to increase the number of tests performed in the U.S. is a shortage in equipment needed to conduct those screenings.

 

  • This week, the American Academy of Medical Colleges wrote Dr. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force, and said the group appreciated the fact that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had taken steps “to reduce regulatory barriers to developing, validating, and deploying” coronavirus tests.

 

  • But the group added that while those tests hold the promise for increased numbers of Covid-19 screenings, “we have come to learn over the past several weeks, despite the best efforts of all parties, not one of these components [needed to run those tests] is readily available in sufficient quantities to each and every lab that needs them.″

 

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