Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House, pushed back Sunday against criticism that the nation was not testing nearly enough people for the coronavirus, saying that not every community needs high levels of testing and that tens of thousands of test results were probably not being reported.
“We need to predict community by community the testing that is needed,” Dr. Birx said on the CBS program “Face the Nation.” “Each will have a different testing need, and that’s what we’re calculating now.”
On the ABC program “This Week,” Dr. Birx said she thought statistics on testing were incomplete: “When you look at the number of cases that have been diagnosed, you realize that there’s probably 30,000 to 50,000 additional tests being done that aren’t being reported right now.”
There are currently about 150,000 diagnostic tests conducted each day, according to the Covid Tracking Project. Researchers at Harvard estimated last week that in order to ease restrictions, the nation needed to at least triple that pace of testing.
When the host of “This Week,” Geroge Stephanopoulos, asked Dr. Birx about that estimate, she said current testing levels were adequate. “We believe it’s been enough in a whole series of the outbreak areas — when you see how Detroit has been able to test, Louisiana, Rhode Island, New York and New Jersey,” Dr. Birx said.
Shortages of supplies have restricted the pace of testing, according to commercial laboratories. Dr. Birx said that a team at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was calling hundreds of labs around the country to determine exactly what supplies they need “to turn on full capacity, which we believe will double the number of tests that are available for Americans.”
Health experts and governors in a number of hard-hit states, including New York and New Jersey, have been insisting that much more widespread testing was needed before social distancing restrictions could be relaxed, even as President Trump has encouraged people in some states to rebel against lockdowns and governors considered easing social distancing restrictions.
Source : Nytimes
