April was another lost month for Trump’s coronavirus response
An expert explains how the Trump administration wasted another month in the fight against Covid-19.
By German Lopez @germanrlopez german.lopez@vox.com May 5, 2020, 10:40am EDT
President Donald Trump’s February response to the coronavirus pandemic was so botched that the New York Times described it as a “lost month.” Throughout that month, Trump spent much of his time denying that the novel coronavirus was a significant threat to Americans — suggesting the virus would miraculously subside — and his administration failed to scale up the testing and health care capacity needed to confront the challenge ahead.
Now, it looks like April was another lost month. In a viral tweet thread, Jeremy Konyndyk, an expert in disease outbreak preparedness at the Center for Global Development, argued that the federal government wasted April in its response to the coronavirus: Despite some gains in March on health care capacity and testing, the US failed to capitalize on social distancing throughout April to continue scaling up measures and get the coronavirus under control.
Consider testing. Experts widely agree that the US needs at least 500,000 Covid-19 tests a day, on the low end, or even tens of millions, on the high end, to safely end extreme social distancing measures. Throughout March, the US made some progress toward that: It went from a few dozen tests a day to a few hundred to more than 100,000.
In April, that progress seemed to stall out. In the last week of April, the US averaged around 220,000 tests a day — not much of an improvement from the roughly 150,000 a day that it reported during the first few weeks of the month, and far from what experts say is needed to control the outbreak (as South Korea and Germany have).
The result, Konyndyk and other experts warn, is the US still isn’t ready to safely reopen its economy. Confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths aren’t trending down — with the country reporting around 25,000 to 30,000 new cases each day throughout April and now into May.
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