Testing, Testing

There are several obstacles that we're facing now in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily centering around the necessity of testing for coronavirus.  It should come as no surprise by now that those obstacles are a direct result of the bungling incompetence of narcissistic dolt Donald "I Don't Take Responsibility At All" Trump during the critical weeks after he was informed multiple times of the danger of the pandemic spreading to the United States. 

From the time he falsely and ludicrously declared that "anybody that wants a test can get a test," to his recent assertion that the individual states, not the Federal government, are responsible for testing, Trump's overriding purpose has been to avoid blame for his failures in judgement and leadership, and pin them on Democrats and the "fake news media":

Initially, President Trump said, anyone who wanted a test could get a test.

Then the testing shortages were due to the previous administration and state-level issues.

Then the United States had tested more than any country.

Except widespread testing was not needed and would not happen.

Over the past 41 days, Trump and his administration have repeatedly shifted their public assurances about coronavirus testing as U.S. testing continues to lag behind that of other countries. And on Thursday, the administration issued guidelines for how states could reopen their economies in phases, even without widespread testing and tracing.

The whole thrust expressed in Trump's latest guidelines is to put the political onus on states to test, treat and then decide when to "reopen," with relatively little Federal assistance (imagine how the victims of the various hurricanes and other disasters in the past would have reacted had their president said that the government wouldn't be helping their states recover).  As Gov. Cuomo put it yesterday, it's "passing the buck without passing the bucks."  It's also being designed as a "heads I win, tails you lose" strategy for deflecting and minimizing political damage prior to the election.

This is especially critical when it comes to testing, since that's a primary metric for being able to understand where we need to put our health resources and as a measure for states to "reopen" their economies.  Here, once again, the Trump regime is dropping the ball by expecting states and a welter of labs to produce the number of testing materials required, rather than by a coordinated Federal effort through the Defense Production Act.  And it's not testing at anywhere near the current level, either:

As some governors consider easing social distancing restrictions, new estimates by researchers at Harvard University suggest that the United States cannot safely reopen unless it conducts more than three times the number of coronavirus tests it is currently administering over the next month.

An average of 146,000 people per day have been tested for the coronavirus nationally so far this month, according to the COVID Tracking Project, which on Friday reported 3.6 million total tests across the country. To reopen the United States by mid-May, the number of daily tests performed between now and then should be 500,000 to 700,000, according to the Harvard estimates.

That level of testing is necessary to identify the majority of people who are infected and isolate them from people who are healthy, according to the researchers. About 20 percent of those tested so far were positive for the virus, a rate that the researchers say is too high.

Though Trump touts the fact that the U.S. is testing more than any other country, just 1 percent have been tested.

During the next month or so, health researchers say the testing has to shift emphasis and become much more widespread:

Health experts said that if the U.S. had tested earlier and more, the outbreak would have been better contained. Caitlin Rivers, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that since that did not happen and the virus spread rapidly, it has made sense to prioritize testing for those in hospitals in recent weeks.

“It does make sense, given constraints, to focus on people with severe illness, because you need that information to guide their care,” Dr. Rivers said.

In mid-May, however, when the researchers estimate infections will have subsided somewhat and states are looking to reopen their economies, Dr. [Ashish] Jha believes vastly expanded testing will be crucial.

“I want to be able to identify everybody who is even mildly symptomatic,” he said...

If, somehow, we get to the point that health experts believe we have tested enough to begin the process of re-opening some states, or parts thereof, it won't be because of an aggressive Federal response, but in spite of it.  Trump believes this can happen by his taking none of the risks while reaping any rewards earned by the hard, difficult work being done in states by real leaders -- the governors.

The damn sociopathic narcissist.

(Photo:  Dimbulb Trump at the Atlanta CDC headquarters on March 6, proclaiming the universal availability of coronavirus tests. Alex Brandon/AP)