Dr. Jha Bombshell: “Testing was the fundamental failure that forced our country to shut down.”
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Protect Our Care’s Coronavirus War Room is today releasing a new digital ad that will air in battleground states highlighting how Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute Dr. Ashish Jha who drew a direct line between the Trump Administration’s testing failure and the U.S. economy having to be shut down.
Dr. Jha said: “Every expert on the left, right, and center agrees that we had to shut our economy down because the outbreak got too big. The outbreak got too big because we didn’t have a testing infrastructure. So testing was the fundamental failure that forced our country to shut down.”
Dr. Jha made the comments during Wednesday’s Select Subcommittee Member Briefing on Testing, Tracing, and Targeted Containment and describes President Trump’s failure build on the United States’ testing capacity in response to the coronavirus, which has led to more than 84,000 deaths and more than 36 million Americans laid off.
“Dr. Jha’s testimony is a smoking gun. He confirms that Donald Trump’s failed response to the coronavirus is the reason the United States was forced to shut down and millions of people are now out of work,” said Coronavirus War Room Director Zac Petkanas. “If Trump didn’t drop the ball on testing families wouldn’t be feeling nearly the level of economic pain right now. Countries like South Korea reported their first cases of coronavirus around the same time as the U.S., but they never had to fully shut down because they tested aggressively early on. Now, months later, Trump still hasn’t developed a comprehensive testing strategy for the country and is putting more Americans at risk by pushing states to reopen without the testing capacity that’s needed.”
Trump dropped the ball on testing at the beginning of the outbreak and has made the crisis worse:
- In April, testing in the U.S. stalled as experts emphasize the need to increase it extensively. Though estimates about exactly how many tests the U.S. needs to conduct per day range from 500,000 to 3,000,000 to 20 million, all are significantly higher than the number of tests the U.S. is currently reporting each day.
- The New York Times exposed that the Administration just didn’t make testing a priority. In fact, during their daily meetings they only discussed it for 5-10 minutes.
- South Korea was able to test 287,000 people eight weeks after its first confirmed coronavirus case. The United States had only reported testing 56,000 people in the same time frame.
- The Trump administration decided early on not to use the tests adopted by the World Health Organization, losing crucial time that the U.S. could have been testing and allowing coronavirus to spread undetected several weeks.
- Trump’s FDA did not relax its testing rules until February 29, 2020. This left independently developed coronavirus tests, including one developed by the University of Washington, on hold for as many as 11 days.
- Hospitals are still struggling to test everyone who shows symptoms — an HHS Office of Inspector General report found many hospitals lacked the supplies necessary to test anyone who was not high risk or whose case was not serious enough to be admitted.
- Leaked documents from Trump’s own CDC and FEMA show that there is a ‘significant risk of resurgence of the virus’ even with a phased reopening if there’s not enough testing.