Anyone who comes near President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence will be given a coronavirus test to limit ‘inadvertent transmission’ of the disease.
‘Starting today anyone who is expected to be in close proximity to either of them will be administered a COVID-19 test to evaluate for pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers status to limit inadvertent transmission,’ said deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere in a statement.
Both Trump and Pence have limited their travel outside of the White House and vice president’s residence.
However both men have had meetings with leaders, including a meeting today with energy executives and members of Congress, and it did not appear those people had been tested under the new policy.
The White House established its own task force to protect the president, 74, and his staff from becoming infected at the begging of the outbreak in early March but today’s report suggests the White House is now deploying more stringent measures.
The rapid COVID-19 testing device manufactured by Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories was unveiled by Trump in the White House Rose Garden last week and can produce a result in just five minutes.
Trump, meanwhile, insists he inherited a “broken test” for the virus.
This is false.
“We inherited a broken test,” Trump said on March 30 on Fox News.
Later in the day, he complained that his administration wasn’t getting enough credit for overcoming what he claimed was a “broken testing system” in order to get a coronavirus test up and running.
“You should be saying congratulations to the men and women who have done this job, who have inherited a broken testing system, and who have made it great,” he said during the March 30 Rose Garden news conference.
Trump’s claims come amid broad criticism that the U.S. was slow to begin testing its residents for coronavirus, hurting early efforts to contain the outbreak.
But it’s impossible for Trump to have inherited a broken testing system for COVID-19.
The novel coronavirus did not exist until late last year, when researchers believe it was transmitted from an animal to a human for the first time.
And there’s little evidence that the actions past administrations hamstrung the Trump administration here, particularly since no administration had faced a pandemic of this nature.
Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the Columbia University National Center for Disaster Preparedness and a public health analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, said the president’s claim was “nonsense.”
“There’s nothing that he inherited that could have hamstrung them,” said Redlener, adding that virus test development is pretty commonplace.
“Even if there was, the World Health Organization and Germany and other places offered us testing equipment and materials, which we decided not to take,” he said.
There is, however, evidence that the Trump administration made early missteps: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention struggled to develop its own test and then, as a limited supply came online, ran the lab work through just a handful of state and federal labs.
That prolonged wait times for a diagnosis while the virus spread further, lab directors and public health experts said last month, and the federal government did not issue new rules speeding the approval process for commercial, research and academic labs until Feb. 29.
Testing capacity has since expanded significantly.