Obama says US has no 'robust' testing system despite Trump touting number of tests given so far
It is not that former president Barack Obama often breaks his silence over the way that his successor, Donald Trump, works. But the Democrat has been found speaking up on issues at a time when the US is coping hard with the COVID-19 pandemic. The country has now the most number of affected people -- over 432,000 -- while the death toll is more than 14,700. The US is set to go past Spain soon to go to the second place after Italy in terms of deaths caused by the coronavirus.
Obama, who recently took an indirect dig at the Trump administration for having denied warnings over the pandemic and warned against denying climate change. His scathing words on social media came in the wake of Trump’s reversing vehicle-fuel economy and greenhouse-gas emissions standards of Obama’s times.
The former president on Wednesday, April 8, spoke again on the US’ coronavirus response. On various social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, he cited a New York Times report to say the country is yet to put in place a ‘robust’ system for testing and monitoring to deal with the crisis.
“Social distancing bends the curve and relieves some pressure on our heroic medical professionals. But in order to shift off current policies, the key will be a robust system of testing and monitoring – something we have yet to put in place nationwide,” the 58-year-old said on Facebook while posting the NYT story about how to know when it’s safe to reopen the country. Trump had tweeted on April 8, "Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten. Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!"
Obama’s remark came a day after Trump reiterated that his administration put up a commendable show in his testing response to the crisis even though Dr Anthony Fauci, the top immunologist and a key member of his coronavirus task force, admitted last month that it was failing. Trump had earlier blamed the previous administration for the challenges his government was facing while dealing with the deadly pandemic. Early in March, he blamed Obama for the shortage of testing kits that the US is facing now.
“We’ve performed 1.87 million tests to date. So that's 1 million, 870 thousand – million tests. Think of that: 1,870,000 tests to date. And now we're performing them at a level that nobody has ever seen before,” Trump on Tuesday, April 7, said at his daily coronavirus briefing at the White House.
US worst among nations when it comes to testing
However, NBC reported that the US was the worst-performing among a set of nations with a population of five million or more on conducting tests per capita. Without sufficient testing of the population, it is not convenient to say where the outbreaks are concentrated and who has been infected more.
The Trump administration was accused of rejecting the World Health Organization’s test initially in favor of developing its own but came up with a sloth display in putting the testing procedure on track even as the pandemic spread fast. It was only after desperate interventions from the top level and a war-like effort that included the private sector that testing started to happen more.
An in-depth article in the New York Times said the US wasted its best chance of restricting the spread of the virus. Even the US’ ally in the Far East -- South Korea -- deployed the testing on a mass scale rapidly and reduced the level of infection within its borders.
The NYT article that Obama cited on social media listed four criteria for reopening the nation. The first of them is when the states are able to test everyone who displays symptoms. It showed an estimate by former Food and Drug Administration chief Dr Scott Gottlieb of conducting 750,000 tests a week.