So Trump is insisting that the country be “re-opened” (whatever that means) next month:
President Trump has all but decided to begin declaring the country ready to get back to business on May 1, two current and two former senior administration officials said, but a scramble is underway inside the White House to determine how to stagger a reopening of the economy amid the novel coronavirus pandemic while also protecting Trump from any political fallout.
Impatient with the economic devastation wrought by social distancing and other mitigation measures — and fearful of the potential damage to his reelection chances — Trump has been adamant in private discussions with advisers about reopening the country next month.
Ok. There are a million reasons why this is nonsense but let’s assume there’s an actual plan. We all know that the only way this can happen with any assurance that a whole bunch of us who managed to get through this first wave of the pandemic won’t get it and die in the next wave is if they put in place a better system for detecting outbreaks .
Trump says that’s not his problem. It’s up to the states to obtain tests and figure out how to do contact tracing. Not his job. He’s got more important things to do. Like tweet.
So the governors have had to take matters into their own hands and form compacts to use their own resources to try to stem the outbreak. (How they can keep people from South Dakota and other places where their ledes have their heads in the sand from coming into the state and infecting us is unknown…)
And anyway, the big roadblock is, you guessed it:
The number of coronavirus tests analyzed each day by commercial labs in the U.S. plummeted by more than 30 percent over the past week, even though new infections are still surging in many states and officials are desperately trying to ramp up testing so the country can reopen.
One reason for the drop-off may be the narrow testing criteria that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last revised in March. The agency’s guidelines prioritize hospitalized patients, health care workers and those thought to be especially vulnerable to the disease, such as the elderly. Health providers have been turning away others in part due to shortages of the swabs used to collect samples.
It’s not clear whether demand has peaked among the groups on the CDC’s priority list. But after being overwhelmed for weeks, commercial labs say they are now sitting with unused testing capacity waiting for samples to arrive.
The continued glitches in the U.S. testing system are threatening to impede attempts to reopen the economy and return to normal life. Expanding testing as much as possible is essential so officials have enough data to determine when it’s safe to lift social distancing measures and allow people to go back to work. Continued testing beyond that point will help officials detect — and stamp out — sparks that could set off new outbreaks.
FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn told POLITICO on Tuesday the White House Coronavirus Task Force is continuing to discuss whether changes to the testing criteria are warranted.
They have learned nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Update: In case you were wondering
A small study in Brazil was halted early for safety reasons after coronavirus patients taking a higher dose of chloroquine developed irregular heart rates that increased their risk of a potentially fatal heart arrhythmia…
Despite its limitations, infectious disease doctors and drug safety experts said the study provided further evidence that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, which are both used to treat malaria, can pose significant harm to some patients, specifically the risk of a fatal heart arrhythmia. Patients in the trial were also given the antibiotic azithromycin, which carries the same heart risk. Hospitals in the United States are also using azithromycin to treat coronavirus patients, often in combination with hydroxychloroquine.