The U.S. death toll from the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic is now over 3,000 — more than the number killed on the day of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And the number of virus fatalities continues to escalate by the hour.
There are various factors at work here, but it’s clear that faster and more effective testing for the virus would have helped slow its spread.
Clear, that is, to nearly everyone but Donald Trump.
The president presided over a conference call with rural state governors on Monday, and Montana’s Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, said it was difficult to get testing equipment.
“I haven’t heard anything about testing being a problem,” Trump responded, adding the false claim that “We’ve tested more now than any nation in the world.”
On Tuesday, two Republican governors, Larry Hogan of Maryland — chairman of the National Governors Association — and Mike DeWine of Ohio, disputed Trump’s words.
“Yeah, that’s just not true,” Hogan said on NPR. “I know that they’ve taken some steps to create new tests, but they’re not actually produced and distributed out to the states.”
Asked specifically about Trump’s testing claims, “Hogan deflected by saying information from the White House coronavirus task force has been accurate,” reports Mediaite.
But as CNN Editor-at-Large Chris Cillizza says: “…the truth is that Trump repeatedly downplayed the threat coronavirus posed to the country, providing Americans with false hope when they needed candor and transparency most of all.”
DeWine, who was interviewed on CNN, stated flatly that contrary to the president’s claims, “we don’t have widespread testing,” adding that it’s “not unique to Ohio.”
Trump’s seeming ignorance about the nature and spread of Covid-19 goes back to the beginning — Jan. 22, one day before the first U.S. virus death occurred in Washington state.
That day, the president claimed that: “We have it totally under control.”
“With the clarity of hindsight, it is obvious the situation was very much not under control. In reality, a lack of testing gave a false picture of how many people across the country were infected,” says the Washington Post.
On Feb. 10, Trump declared that “We’re in great shape in our country. We have 11 [coronavirus cases], and the 11 are getting better.”
The CDC and state health laboratories had tested about 800 Americans for the virus — “roughly 2.4 tests per million people in the United States,” the Post says.
“In conrast, South Korea, which found its first case on the same day as the United States, had tested nearly 8,000 people, or 154.7 tests per million.”
And less than six weeks later, the Post says, inadequate and flawed testing had “left the government blind to the virus’s spread,” opening the door “for 11 confirmed cases to balloon to more than 100,000….”
By last Saturday, the U.S. had still performed only 2,250 tests per million people, just “two-thirds of what South Korea did almost three weeks earlier.” Just under 2,200 people had died in the U.S. In South Korea, the number was 144.
Like South Korea, other nations have found that intensive and widespread “testing, testing, testing” saves many lives.
With more than 160,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 now in the U.S., health officials warn that as many as 200,000 people could die.
And that’s “if we do things … almost perfectly.”
