Anger grows
at Trump administration's coronavirus testing failures
Donald
Trump claimed ‘We have tested heavily’ but in fact just eight tests were
carried out on Tuesday, as even allies speak out
Ed
Pilkington in New York
@edpilkington
Thu 12 Mar
2020 20.27 GMTLast modified on Fri 13 Mar 2020 01.06 GMT
On Thursday
the lack of testing capacity for Covid-19 was recognised in blunt terms by one
of the top US officials dealing with the crisis. Dr Anthony Fauci, director of
the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described the
current state of affairs as “a failing” at a hearing of the House oversight
committee.
From
Congress to state capitals across the country, politicians of both main parties
have shown rare bipartisan agreement that the pace of federal testing is
woefully inadequate. Congress members who were given private briefings by Trump
administration officials on Thursday expressed shock and outrage that so far
only 11,000 tests have been conducted in a country of 327 million people.
By contrast
South Korea, which has been grappling with one of the most severe outbreaks of
Covid-19 globally, tests roughly the same number, about 10,000 people, every
day. In total, South Korea has tested 230,000 of its 51 million people – 130
times as many per capita as the US.
The
aggressive use of testing to identify carriers of the disease and quarantine
them has been credited as a major factor in South Korea’s relative success in
dealing with the crisis.
One of the
most astounding indications that the US is falling abysmally behind where it
needs to be in getting to grips with the crisis is given by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in its coronavirus database. It records
the number of specimens tested daily for Covid-19 by CDC and public health
labs.
It shows
that on Tuesday, the most recent entry given, the total number of specimens
tested across the whole of the US was eight.
Answering
press questions in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said: “Frankly, the
testing has been going very smooth.” He added: “We have heavily tested.”
That is
factually incorrect, and a growing number of public officials, including from
his own party, are willing to say so.
Members of
Congress who attended a bipartisan House briefing expressed anger about testing
failures.
Mike
Quigley, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, said: “We are not where we
need to be and not sure when we are going to get there. We are flying blind.”
Mark Walker,
a Republican congressman from North Carolina, told CNN that there was “a
growing frustration among members as a whole to get more definitive answers”.
The Republican senator and former presidential nominee Mitt Romney of Utah
said: “Our system has just not been up to snuff and I think a lot of people are
frustrated by it. I’m one of them.”
Andrew
Cuomo, governor of New York, which is one of the states hardest hit by the
disease so far, told CNN the US was “way behind on testing”. What he called a
“federal bottleneck” was so bad that he had authorised New York authorities to
contract out testing to private laboratories.
Cuomo said
the paucity of testing not only prevented containment of localised outbreaks,
it also gave the public a false sense of security by obscuring how prevalent
the disease has already become. “It’s because we have no testing capacity,
that’s why the numbers are low. If you actually had testing capacity you would
see how high the numbers are already. As we do ramp up testing you are going to
see those numbers go sky-high.”
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