President Trump today shrugged off the need to significantly expand nationwide coronavirus testing capabilities in order to be able to restart the U.S. economy and then keep it open.
Trump, who has expressed optimism that parts of the country could begin easing social distancing restrictions by early May, told reporters a White House briefing that ramping up testing to levels recommended by health experts to quickly identify new clusters would be a goal, but is not a necessity to send people back to work.
“We want to have it and we’re going to see if we have it. Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes,” Trump said. “We’re talking about 325 million people. And that’s not going to happen, as you can imagine, and it would never happen with anyone else either.”
But experts say that widespread testing is a crucial step.
Easing blunt measures like stay-at-home orders requires enough widespread testing to identify infected people so they can be isolated and people they’ve been in contact with notified, they say.
While some progress has been made on testing, experts say the U.S. is not at the level it needs to be to achieve that.
Scott Gottlieb, Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, said today that several million tests per week are needed, calling for “rapid progress” on that front.
“In a setting where there will still be spread and we’ll still be slowly exiting the epidemic; we need capacity to test several million people a week (and probably more) to get broad enough coverage in community to detect outbreaks early and make case containment strategies work,” Gottlieb tweeted.
The U.S. tested about 960,000 people in the past week, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
“Without a lot greater testing capacity, there is no way we can safely open up again,” tweeted Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
He pointed to problems obtaining needed testing supplies like swabs and chemicals used in the tests, and called for Congress to provide more funding to ramp up the effort.
The administration’s push to get back to business comes as a record 6.6 million unemployment claims were filed last week, according to the latest Labor Department figures released today.
The staggering number of first-time claims was on top of the more than 10 million applications filed in the last two weeks of March.
It means that more than one in 10 American workers have lost their jobs as tough measures to control the coronavirus outbreak abruptly grounded the country to a halt.
The new jobless claims figures collectively constitute the largest and fastest string of job losses in records dating to 1948.
The viral outbreak is believed to have erased nearly one-third of the economy’s output in the current quarter.
About 95 percent, or 48 states, are now under some form of lockdown with non-essential businesses shutting down. Restaurants, hotels, department stores and small businesses have laid off millions as they struggle to pay bills at a time when their revenue has vanished.