“Anybody that needs a test, gets a test,” Trump said on March 6. “They have the tests. And the tests are beautiful.” He said the same day, “Anybody that wants a test can get a test.”
Not true.
The greatly expanding but still vastly insufficient capacity to test people is steered mostly to those who are already sick or to essential workers at the most risk of exposure.
Within three weeks of China’s New Year’s Eve notification of mysterious pneumonia cases, China had sequenced the genetic makeup of the virus, German scientists had developed a test for detecting it and the World Health Organization had adopted the test and moved toward global distribution.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bypassed the WHO. test and sponsored its own, which was flawed out of the gate. Trump said the WHO test was flawed but it wasn’t.
Precious time was lost.
Germany, in contrast, raced ahead with aggressive testing of a broad segment of the population when it had fewer than 10 cases in January. It has experienced far fewer deaths proportionally than the United States.
“There were many, many opportunities not to end up where we are,” Dr. Ashish K. Jha, director of the Global Health Institute at Harvard, told AP.
Trump told Americans March 13 that a division of Google’s parent company was coming out with a website that would let people determine online if they should get a test and, if so, swing by a nearby place to get one. “It’s going to be very quickly done,” he said. The website is operational in just four California counties.
Drive-through sites that he promised would expedite testing were plagued with shortages and delays, such that many people with symptoms and a doctor’s order were turned away.
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