This piece in The Atlantic about the two main problems with the government response to the coronavirus — lack of testing and fudging of numbers — is chilling. Everyone is operating in the dark because the federal government is failing to do the necessary coordination.
It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?
This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.
“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”
Oh, I think we know, don’t we?
Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.
To arrive at our estimate, we contacted the public-health departments of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We gathered data on websites, and we corresponded with dozens of state officials. All 50 states and D.C. have made some information available, though the quality and timeliness of the data varied widely. Some states have only committed to releasing their numbers once or three times a week. Most are focused on the number of confirmed cases; only a few have publicized the number of people they are capable of testing.
The Atlantic’s numbers reflect the best available portrait of the country’s testing capacity as of early this morning. These numbers provide an accurate baseline, but they are incomplete. Scattered on state websites, the data available are not useful to citizens or political leaders. State-based tallies lack the reliability of the CDC’s traditional—but now abandoned—method of reporting. Several states—including New Jersey, Texas, and Louisiana—have not shared the number of coronavirus tests they have conducted overall, meaning their number of positive results lacks crucial context.
The net effect of these choices is that the country’s true capacity for testing has not been made clear to its residents. This level of obfuscation is unexpected in the United States, which has long been a global leader in public-health transparency.
Oh, and even as Trump brags incessantly about how he “closed the borders” and did a better job than any leader has ever done in world history, get a load of this from a VICE news reporter:
When I arrived at New York’s JFK airport Thursday after spending days outside a coronavirus hot zone in Italy, I was expecting a shakedown: a temperature check at customs and some questions about where exactly in the region I’d been and if I had come into contact with any sick people during my stay.
Instead, I breezed right through security, faster than any other time I can remember.
The lack of precautions was jarring considering where I’d just been. Even though I didn’t go inside the exclusion zone out of an abundance of caution, the fact that I’d been in the region of Lombardy should have raised a red flag. According to the Italian government, of the 4,636 people in the country who’ve contracted the virus, around half got it in Lombardy. And Italy as a whole is currently the epicenter of the European outbreak.
Here is your president being a serious leader at a time of crisis:
Here he admits that he’s cooking the numbers:
And how about the evil monster Kellyanne Conway: