A report by Josh Kovensky at Talking Points Memo:
The Trump administration is ending funding and support for local COVID-19 testing sites around the country this month, as cases and hospitalizations are skyrocketing in many states.
The federal government will stop providing money and support for 13 sites across five states which were originally set up in the first months of the pandemic to speed up testing at the local level.
Local officials and public health experts expressed a mixture of frustration, resignation, and horror at the decision to let federal support lapse.
This is, of course, insane.
It’s an exclusive to TPM, so we’ll have to see who else can confirm it.
The last time the Trump administration tried to end support for the sites was at the end of April until public outcry forced an extension. Kovensky reports there were 41 testing sites originally, but it’s now down to 13: “Texas’ seven, Illinois and New Jersey each have two, while Colorado and Pennsylvania each have one.”
UPDATE FOLLOWUP by Josh Kovensky, June 24, 2020:
After TPM broke the story on Tuesday, Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Brett Giroir issued a statement saying that the government was not ending “funding or support” for COVID-19 testing sites, but that it was instead focusing on a separate program supporting testing at pharmacies and federally qualified health centers.
“The only truthful, but still misleading report in the media, is that we are transitioning 13 sites from the original now antiquated program to the more efficient and effective testing sites outlined above,” Giroir said, adding that governors from the five affected states had “agreed that it was the appropriate time to transition out of the original 13 sites and into the thousands of new testing options.”
At the same time as Giroir calls the testing sites “antiquated” and praises the “new testing options,” local officials and representatives for some of the testing locations have been begging his department to keep supporting the sites.
Kovensky cites public health officials in Texas, Colorado, and Pennsylvania who want the testing programs extended, along with support from some of their Congressional representatives. The testing cutback comes at a time when the pandemic continues to spread.
New York, New Jersey and Connecticut impose 14-day quarantine on travelers from coronavirus hotspot states.
- Travelers arriving to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from regions with spiking Covid-19 infections rates will be subject to a 14-day quarantine, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said on Wednesday.
- As of Wednesday, the states that are above that level are Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Washington, Utah, Texas, he said.
- Cuomo said the infection rate is based on the number of infections per 100,000 residents on a 7-day rolling average.
UPDATE — More pushback from Administration, more fallout 6-24-20
When Trump said he wasn’t kidding about slowing down testing….. he wasn’t kidding. I posted this earlier today:
Do you want to know the strategy Trump and the GOP have chosen to deal with the coronavirus? It's simple.
They want us to get used to the virus death toll the way we ignore the death toll from guns, police violence, poverty, lack of health care, and so on.
The GOP is post-policy. Solving problems is not what they do.
MAGA.
Trump is trying to make the virus simply a local problem — let the states handle it. He takes no responsibility. His actions are one reason public health professionals are getting death threats.
Steve Benen’s new book looks like it’s going to be a Must-Read: The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics
Republicans, simply put, have quit governing. As MSNBC's Steve Benen charts in his groundbreaking new book, the contemporary GOP has become a "post-policy party." Republicans are effectively impostors, presenting themselves as officials who are ready to take seriously the substance of problem solving, but whose sole focus is the pursuit and maintenance of power. Astonishingly, they are winning-at the cost of pushing the political system to the breaking point.
Despite having billed itself as the "party of ideas," the Republican Party has walked away from the hard but necessary work of policymaking. It is disdainful of expertise and hostile toward evidence and arithmetic. It is tethered to few, if any, meaningful policy preferences. It does not know, and does not care, about how competing proposals should be crafted, scrutinized, or implemented. This policy nihilism dominated the party's posture throughout Barack Obama's presidency, which in turn opened the door to Donald Trump -- who would cement the GOP's post-policy status in ways that were difficult to even imagine a few years earlier.
The saying “vote like your life depends on it” stopped being a joke after 2016.