The White House unveiling of rapid tests for COVID-19 was a Trump classic: Donald Trump in the Rose Garden, unboxing a testing device and declaring it “a whole new ballgame.” And the aftermath has likewise been a Trump classic: states complaining that they got devices to run tests, but only enough tests for 115 people.
”It's incredibly frustrating, because it was a lot of talk about this device, there was a lot of hype on it nationally and that was wonderful and then when they showed up, expectations were set really high,” New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, said at a press conference last week. “But to actually have these, 13 of these devices, and have no way to use them—I'm banging my head against the wall. I really am.”
The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention was told to expect enough tests for 2,300 people. It got enough for 115 people.
The Trump administration, in the form of Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, whined that “No good deed goes unpunished,” his supposed good deed having been that he didn’t buy all of the available tests from Abbott Laboratories and send them to the states, leaving many for other healthcare providers to buy. Except that in Minnesota, for example, it’s not just the state itself that’s short of tests: 20 hospitals and clinics have testing devices but no tests to use in them.
Rapid tests are critically important for stopping the spread of the disease by identifying who has it now, and they’re similarly important for having capacity to care for sick people—if doctors and nurses and EMTs are spending days or even weeks in quarantine, waiting for test results, rather than getting back on the job immediately if they test negative, then hospitals are that much more easily overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases.
Detroit, which faces a major outbreak, managed to get a large number of tests directly from Abbott and is using them to test first responders and nursing home employees and residents. That’s the kind of important work that can be done with rapid tests. How did Detroit get those tests? The mayor called the CEO of Abbott at home on a Sunday morning immediately after their existence was announced and struck a deal. But while that’s great for Detroit, it’s another terrible statement about how this whole process is being run.
”What it points to is the utter failure of a national public health system that should have been identifying the needs, scaling the resources and allocating the resources in a way that would optimally meet the need," Santa Clara Mayor Sam Liccardo, who has been fruitlessly trying to get more tests, told CNN.
As per usual when it comes to coronavirus testing, the Trump administration is promising more tests soon. Next week. For real. But testing is the essential ingredient necessary for reopening anything, and the Trump administration continues to fail us.
