The U.S. will need to produce hundreds of millions of coronavirus tests in order to give parents and students the confidence they need to return to school in the fall, Sen. Lamar Alexander said today
The United States will need to produce hundreds of millions of coronavirus tests in order to give parents and students the confidence they need to return to school in the fall, Sen. Lamar Alexander said in an interview on Friday.
As chairman for the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Republican lawmaker said he is spending his days and nights at home in Tennessee “trying to encourage a Manhattan Project for testing” so that every American later this year will have access to a test.The effort is critical to allowing some semblance of normalcy this fall by letting kids go back to school in time for the fall semester.
“My fear is that we’ll get to August and the government says we can all go back to school or back to college,” Alexander said by telephone. “And a lot of people won’t want to do it unless they can be assured that they don't have the disease, but just as important, that the classmate next to them doesn’t have the disease.”
The scale of the effort is essentially unheard of, but is key for the country to move beyond social distancing that will plague the economy until the government and companies boost their testing or find a vaccine. Alexander said Congress and the administration had stumbled by putting up roadblocks and regulations that made developing new tests and treatments more difficult.
“The big test for the administration right now is: Can you scale up the production of hundreds of millions of tests, several new treatments and hundreds of millions of doses of an effective vaccine as quickly as possible?” Alexander said.related to the pandemic, rather than sweeping catch-all legislation.
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