US President Donald Trump has shrugged off the need to significantly expand countrywide coronavirus testing capabilities, saying he wants to reopen the country next month despite concerns from both economists and health experts that the worsening pandemic.
Trump, who reportedly wants to restart business by May 1, told reporters during a White House briefing on Thursday that his administration will ramp up testing to levels which are recommend by health experts but people have to go 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.”
On Friday, Trump said the decision on when and how to reopen the country is the most difficult one he’s had to make in his life.
“I don’t know that I’ve had a bigger decision. But I’m going to surround myself with the greatest minds. Not only the greatest minds, but the greatest minds in numerous different businesses, including the business of politics and reason,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
“And we’re going to make a decision, and hopefully it’s going to be the right decision,” he added. “I will say this. I want to get it open as soon as we can.”
US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in an interview on Thursday was asked if he thought the country could reopen in about a month. He said, “I do.”
But US health experts are worried that reopening the country prematurely could severely reverse some of the progress the country has made in battling the coronavirus.
Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, said that several million tests per week are needed to contain the disease.
“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.
Last week, the United States tested some 960,000 people, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
“Without a lot greater testing capacity, there is no way we can safely open up again,” said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
US deaths due to coronavirus topped 17,820 on Friday, with more than 475,000 confirmed cases.
US officials warned Americans to expect alarming numbers of coronavirus deaths this week.
US deaths, the second highest in the world, set new daily records on Tuesday and Wednesday with over 1,900 new deaths reported each day, according to a Reuters tally.
The country had over 1,600 deaths on Thursday, with several states yet to report their latest figures.
US Surgeon General Jerome Adams has said that most of the United States would not be able to open up by May 1, as President Trump has suggested.
“There are places around the country that have seen consistently low levels and as we ramp up testing and can feel more confident that these places actually can do surveillance and can do public health follow-up, some places will be able to think about opening on May 1,” Adams said on Friday.
“Most of the country will not, to be honest with you, but some will. That’s how we’ll reopen the country: place by place, bit by bit, based on the data,” added Adams, a member of the White House coronavirus task force.
Addressing the testing issue, he said it would be a “high bar” to test every American and that the Trump administration was aiming to have the capacity to test 1 out of 100 or 1 out of 50 people.
“We want to know what’s going on in the community and we want to be able to test people who are at high risk who have symptoms so that we can quickly follow up and contain diseases,” he said.
Source: Agencies
