President Donald Trump and his officials apparently only found out about the severe lack of coronavirus testing because they heard about it from the media, according to a damning new Wall Street Journal report detailing the failed response to the pandemic.
Trump’s response to the pandemic has been atrocious, and he is only now taking it seriously as cases in the United States nears 9,500 and the number of deaths stands at around 150.
The slow response is mostly due to Trump only wanting good news and his obsession with denying that there’s a crisis on his watch. But it’s also because he dismantled the Pandemic Response team, refused to listen to Obama officials during the transition and has failed to fully staff the Centers for Disease Control.
The staffing failure, combined with Trump’s concerted effort to keep officials quiet about the extent of the dangers of the virus, resulted in a failure by that agency to produce testing kits.
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According to the Wall Street Journal:
While the virus was quietly spreading within the U.S., the CDC had told state and local officials its ‘testing capacity is more than adequate to meet current testing demands,’ according to a Feb. 26 agency email viewed by The Wall Street Journal, part of a cache of agency communications reviewed by the Journal that sheds light on the early response. The agency’s data show it tested fewer than 100 patients that day.
When the CDC first dispersed test kits in early February, it shipped them to a network of state and local government labs and restricted testing to people with virus symptoms who had recently traveled to China, where the virus first emerged, or had been exposed to a known case. Federal officials hoped the virus could be contained—even as they disputed alarms from those on the front lines that the CDC’s guidelines weren’t keeping up with the outbreak’s spread, emails between the U.S. agency and local officials show. The government left other laboratories on the sidelines for crucial weeks.”
Trump’s decision to drop FDA regulations also compounded the problem because private companies rushed to buy up supplies to develop their own testing kits, thus depriving the CDC of what they needed to make more. Plus, the Trump administration was slow to reach out to hospitals and private labs.
When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, also involved in the response, finally opened testing to more outside labs, a run on limited stocks of some supplies needed for the CDC-developed test quickly depleted stores, lab operators and suppliers said. Hospital and commercial lab operators said the government didn’t reach out to enlist their help until it was too late.”
Perhaps the most damning failure detailed by the report is that Trump and his team had no clue about testing shortages until they heard about it from the media, and were not taking the shortage seriously until two weeks ago.
Some White House aides learned of complaints about the availability of testing from the media, not the public-health officials in their own government, an administration official familiar with the matter said. Only in the first week of March did discussions in a White House coronavirus task force about the testing shortfall take on a sense of urgency, the person said.”
Had Trump taken the outbreak seriously while it was still just overseas, Americans would have been more aware and could have begun social distancing earlier on. Government agencies such as the CDC also would have been more prepared. Our country could have been well-stocked with testing kits, masks, and ventilators. Lives could have been saved and the spread could have been slower.
Instead, this pandemic is widespread and states are struggling to catch up. People are panicking and the stock market is in free-fall. A real leader would have done better.
Featured image via screen capture
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