Trump claims US can run 5M coronavirus tests a day, testing chief disagrees: 'Absolutely no way'
US President Donald Trump claims the US will soon reach a testing milestone of running 5 million tests a day. But is that goal achievable with the current technology?
According to a top United States Department of Health and Human Services official overseeing testing, the US is no position to run 5 million tests a day. Admiral Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of health, told TIME hours before Trump's claim that “there is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even five million tests a day.”
The next day, Trump clarified his statements denying making those claims. But he added the US would reach that goal at some point.
“Somebody came out with a study of 5 million people. Do I think we will? I think we will, but I never said it,” Trump is reported to have said during an event at the White House. “Somebody started throwing around 5 million. I didn’t say 5 million. Well, we will be there. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say it," he added.
The idea of reaching 5 million tests a day stems from a recent Harvard University study, which said the country needs at least 5 million tests a day by early June, and 20 million per day by late July, to reopen the economy.
"We acknowledge that even this number may not be high enough to protect public health. In that considerably less likely eventuality, we will need to scale-up testing much further. By the time we know, if we need to do that, we should be in a better position to know how to do it. In any situation, achieving these numbers depends on testing innovation," the team wrote in their report.
Commenting on the study, Giroir told TIME that it set an “an Ivory Tower, unreasonable benchmark" that couldn’t be supported by current technology. Besides, other experts have called this large-scale measure expensive. It could cost the country $100 billion, but that pales in comparison to the cost of keeping the economy shut, Paul Romer, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, told Vox.
But the US has conducted only over 6.2 million tests until now, according to The COVID Tracking project, a volunteer organization that collects and publishes testing data. And over the past week, the country is running an average of 220,000 tests a day. They have tested less than 2% of the population.
To increase testing, Trump released a "blueprint" to increase testing capacity across the country, asking states to draw up their plans to scale up the process. And Giroir plans to scale up testing to reach the 8 million per month mark by May.
Experts say the US is not testing enough.“If a state misjudges its true underlying infection trajectory, it may suffer large flare-ups of the disease, necessitating a long and painful lockdown again,” wrote Dr Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. “Yet most states are a long way from adequate testing—and the tracing of contacts that must follow.”