Trump: We’ve enough tests to reopen America

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump told America, “We have enough testing to begin the reopening” of America during a Rose Garden briefing with corporate leaders Monday.

It was a show of Trump’s ability to harness leaders in the private sector to work together with state and federal officials to beat “the invisible enemy” and an opportunity to release a new White House blueprint for states to step up their testing capacity.

Democrats were skeptical.

“Almost two months after promising ‘anybody that wants a test can get a test,’ Trump’s new testing strategy would only test 2 percent of a state’s residents,” the Democratic National Committee responded.

As a reward for their efforts, Trump invited CEOs from major testing concerns — LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics — manufacturers in the testing supply chain and retail giants like Walmart and CVS that have begun to administer the tests to speak to America from the Rose Garden.

“They’re part of this army of health-care professionals,” CVS CEO Larry Mero said. CVS can do 35,000 tests per week, he added.

The event also highlighted the tug-of-war between Trump and the nation’s governors, who have advocated for a more robust federal role in producing and distributing tests. Trump has said they are asking too much from Washington, which Trump claims should be “the supplier of last resort.”

“For several weeks, my administration has encouraged the governors to leverage unused testing capacity in states,” Trump said. “Very few understood that we have tremendous capacity.”

The task force’s efforts to produce and manufacture tests on a broad scale has endured many challenges.

Early on, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention produced and sent tests to laboratories only to learn they were difficult to validate. In February, the Food and Drug Administration provided COVID-19 material to private companies so that they could develop tests.

But these tests took time to process — which kept doctors and patients in the dark for days, even weeks, as they waited to learn who tested positive with the highly infectious disease. The push was on to develop tests that quickly could determine who did and did not have the virus — a goal realized with the Abbott test, which offered a quick diagnosis.

Even when rapid tests are readily available, some believe life in the United States will not return to normal until there is a vaccine to prevent infection.

Bill Gates recently told Fox News Sunday that even if we are testing “the right people to understand what’s going on, which is not the case yet, those numbers will start to go down. And then we can look at some degree of opening back up.”

Gates added, “It is fair to say things won’t go back to truly normal until we have a vaccine that we’ve gotten out to basically the entire world.”

The White House scheduled Monday’s briefing for 2 p.m., canceled it, then later announced the task force would meet with the press corps in the Rose Garden amid speculation that daily briefings could be canceled.

Firehouse Strategies and Optimus Analytics released a tracking survey that showed Trump’s approval rating dropped from a high of 52 percent over April to 48 percent, along with a 10 percent drop in the number of Americans who watch the daily briefings, falling from 64 percent to 54 percent.

“We did ask, have you been watching the briefings and do you think they’re useful,” said Alex Conant, a founding partner of Firehouse Strategies. “From a political perspective, it’s not working.”

“People are unhappy with the federal response,” while they approve of their governors’ handling of the outbreak, Conant added.

Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.