In response to President Trump tweeting “REOPEN OUR COUNTRY!”, Coronavirus War Room Director Zac Petkanas issued the following statement:
“President Trump keeps talking about reopening the country, but he’s the reason it had to shut down in the first place. Trump didn’t prioritize widespread testing at the beginning of the outbreak while countries like South Korea did. The result? By testing about 10 times the number of people the United States tested in the first eight weeks, South Korea never had to fully shut down. America did.
“The bottom line is that If Trump had taken testing seriously at the beginning of the outbreak, America may have been able to avoid the type of severe shut downs that have forced millions out of their jobs and led to a hundred thousand small businesses closing their doors.”
Last week, Protect Our Care’s Coronavirus War Room released a digital ad highlighting how Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute Dr. Ashish Jha drew a direct line between the Trump Administration’s testing failure and the U.S. economy having to be shut down.
Here’s how 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.