The coronavirus enemy remained 'invisible' because the Trump administration didn't make the effort to see it via alexnazaryan
WASHINGTON — In late February, Vice President Mike Pence was appointed to lead the White House coronavirus task force by President Trump. He became immediately alarmed by the shortfalls in testing availability.
That helps explain why, two months later, virtually all of the problems Pence identified remain as vexing as they were when he took charge. And it explains why top public health figures talk about testing much as they did when the pathogen first made landfall in the United States in early January: that is, as a conundrum that would be resolved at some unknown future date.
So why, four months into an epidemic, is a nation ranked as the world’s most prepared for a pandemic still waiting for a testing breakthrough? Now the Trump administration is moving to reopen the country, even though it has not tested enough Americans to fully grasp the scope of the disease, let alone begin declaring victory over what Trump likes to call “the invisible enemy.” That enemy has remained invisible in good part because most people have no means of finding out if they are, or have recently been, infected with the coronavirus.
Frustrations with these delays have been felt by ordinary Americans simply seeking a coronavirus test and prominent figures dismayed at a superpower struggling to deploy relatively simple medical equipment. In a Reddit question-and-answer session, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates lamented that the “testing in the U.S. is not organized yet. In the next few weeks, I hope the government fixes this by having a website you can go to to find out about home testing and kiosks.
The testing shortfalls are rooted in the administration’s decision to let states handle the testing issue on their own. At the same time, many states wanted the federal government to give them license to pursue their own plans, even as they pressed Washington to give them the resources to bring those plans to fruition.
In an emailed response to questions from Yahoo News, Giroir said that “testing production capacity keeps getting better and better,” and that laboratories and hospitals across the nation could test between 120,000 and 150,000 people per day. Giroir additionally said that the White House task force was “encouraging diagnostic test developers and manufacturers to rapidly develop new technologies and scale up testing inventory.
Bossert, for his part, was reluctant to criticize Trump. He told Yahoo News that the “challenge isn’t deciding who is in charge or who to blame. There is plenty of work and blame to share. The challenge is establishing a common objective and unity of effort.” Trump was also slow to recognize the scope of the looming threat, and his administration’s lack of preparation. In early March, he toured CDC headquarters in Atlanta and was asked by a journalist about the apparent difficulty of obtaining a coronavirus test. Trump disputed that any such difficulty existed. “Anybody that wants a test can get a test,” the president said. “That’s what the bottom line is.
DeSantis was, in other words, describing the exact same supply chain problem that Admiral Giroir would still be struggling with more than a month later. The White House has appointed a bevy of other officials to help resolve supply chain problems. They included Rear Adm. John Polowczyk, who oversees supply chain efforts for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, along with presidential son-in-law and counselor Jared Kushner, who is reportedly assisting Polowczyk.
White House officials insist that leaving the states to procure their own tests and testing supplies was not an abdication of responsibility. “The response effort has always been locally executed, state managed and federally supported,” the task force official said. The federal government, he argued, “can only do so much to get resources to the states,” and it was ultimately the governors’ responsibility to make sure tests were being administered to their citizens.
“The states will be responsible for how the strategy will work in their state. But that is dependent upon an expanded supply chain and a consistent supply chain. And that’s where the federal government really comes in,” Becker said. He acknowledged a “true ramp-up” of testing had not yet taken place. He hoped that one would soon.
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