And with testing, you know, testing is a double-edged sword. We've tested now 25 million people. It's probably 20 million people more than anybody else. ... Here's the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people, you're going to find more cases. So I said to my people, slow the testing down, please. They test and they test.
After several administration officials raced around this weekend insisting Donald Trump was joking when he claimed he told "[his] people" to ease up on testing for SARS-CoV-2 as the pandemic was rapidly spreading across the US, Trump, oblivious to reality, came out on Monday and contradicted them all, all but directly
re-confirming what he had said in all seriousness to his tiny Tulsa troupe, that the US had done "too good of a job" at testing.
If it did slow down, frankly, I think we're way ahead of ourselves, if you want to know the truth. We've done too good of a job. Because every time we go with 25 million tests, you're gonna find more people, so then they say, "Oh, we have more cases in the United States."
(Trump's claim that more cases come from more tests is a lie. The Washington Post
reported last week:
In six states — Kentucky, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming — the seven-day average of new cases has increased since May 31 while the average number of daily tests being conducted has declined, according to data collected by the COVID Tracking Project and the New York Times. In 14 other states, the rate of new cases is increasing faster than the increase in the average number of tests. ...
In 10 states, the seven-day average of the rate at which tests are coming back positive has increased more than 2 percentage points since the end of May. In 11 other states, the seven-day average for the number of new deaths is up at least 5 percent since the end of last month. ...
[In Alabama] the seven-day average number of new cases per day has increased faster than the number of tests being conducted.
While Trump's admission of deliberately reducing testing should be, on its own, grounds for immediate removal from office (it won't, of course, and Democrats won't even bother suggesting such a thing), it stands as merely one piece of straw in an enormous, festering haystack of criminal, immoral, racist, misogynist, corrupt, fascist, treasonous, nepotistic, narcissistic, mentally-deranged behaviour.
The claims that Trump was only wisecracking were as impossible to believe as Trump's claims of running down the West Point ramp. (He can't
not spin the most ludicrous lies about even the small perceived slight, even though he knows video exists.)
Since the emergence of the virus, Trump has consistently expressed a strong desire to avoid testing, in all of his public comments. And he actually has done far more (and far worse) than "nothing".
First, Trump rejected properly-working coronavirus tests from the World Health Organization, because he supposedly wanted only American-made test kits. When those were finally sent out, they were faulty.
In early March, when he was still saying the virus would disappear like "magic" and "like a miracle", Trump did not want to let
passengers (including 21 infected Americans) off a docked cruise ship
because "I don't need to have the numbers [of confirmed cases] double because of one ship that wasn't our fault. ... I like the numbers being where they are."
That same day, Trump said he
disagreed with proactive efforts to identify virus trouble spots.
We're going out and proactively looking to see where there's a problem. We don't have to do that ... I even - don't even know if I agree with that. You'll find those areas just by sitting back and waiting. ... You would normally find out by waiting.
"Sitting back and waiting" has been Trump's plan from the very beginning, from mid-November 2019, when he was first warned of the virus. It's been
more than seven months since then and Trump never presented a plan for containing the virus or managing the economy his inaction demolished. At this point, he has abandoned even the pretext of caring what happens. This weekend, he compared having COVID-19 to "the sniffles".
On April 10, Trump said there was
no need to test in rural areas:
Certain sections of the — if we go to Iowa, we go to Nebraska, we go — and interestingly, Idaho is very interesting because they had a few breakouts, small breakouts. But they're very, very capable states and they're big distances. A lot of land. A lot of opening. You don't need testing there, you know, where you have a state with a small number of cases. ... So when you have that, you don't need testing.
On May 6, Trump explained why he had been consistently
refusing to institute a nationwide testing plan:
So the media likes to say we have the most cases, but we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn't have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad . . .. I think that's a correct statement.
At that time, Philip Bump of the Washington Post
wrote that saying testing leads to more reported cases is
true in the same way that a city that never arrests anyone will have a very low number of recorded crimes. It offers a solution if your concern is the metric, but not if your concern is the actual amount of crime that's occurring. ... This would not be the first time Trump has indicated that the number of cases is of more concern to him than the affected individuals.
About one week later, Stephanie Miller, an aide to Vice President Mike Pence (and the wife of White House adviser Stephen Miller) tested positive. Trump claimed her test result showed that
testing is worthless:
This is why the whole concept of tests aren't necessarily great. The tests are perfect, but something can happen between a test — where it's good, and then something happens, and all of a sudden — she was tested very recently and tested negative. And then today, I guess, for some reason, she tested positive.
Just last week, Trump claimed testing was "
overrated" and
insisted that if it was stopped, "we'd have very few cases, if any".
These comments, made over three months, prove Trump
still has no concept of how testing works. Any person who has felt ill and gone to a doctor (even little kids who go with their parents) understands why testing is necessary. Trump does not and seemingly
cannot. He also has no idea how ignorant and stupid he sounds on a daily basis.
Ashish K. Jha is the Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
Jha
tweeted that it was "amazing to hear the President publicly admit this policy" of purposefully reducing testing at the same time the pandemic was raging across the country, but it "is consistent with everything I have heard in conversations with folks in the federal government". There has been "a concerted effort to reduce availability of testing for Americans [w]hile ramping up testing White House staff".
Reduced testing is only one part of Trump's criminal negligence. He
demanded that governors praise him in order to get life-saving supplies. He
refused to help states run by Democratic governors, publicly saying they were on their own when it came to getting medical supplies. Then Trump ordered FEMA and other government agencies to
actively prevent those states from receiving supplies they had purchased. Shipments were
hijacked in
transit and
never reached their intended destinations. States were forced to use secret codes and install armed guards at small airports to protect the incoming supplies from being stolen by the government. Trump also
stole five million
masks meant for veterans hospitals.
The US death toll passed 122,000 over the weekend. It has not even been four months since the first death was reported. Trump
spoke for 102 minutes in Tulsa on Saturday and did not mention the many American deaths even once.
According to a recent study, if the US had responded with the same speed and comprehensiveness as Germany, Australia, South Korea, or Singapore, approximately 70%-90% of the lives lost could have been saved.
Assuming a middle ground of 80%,
98,000 Americans would still be alive if easily-followed procedures had been in place. The country would be looking at 24,400 deaths right now.
In the wake of the U.S. response, 117,858 Americans died in the four months following the first 15 confirmed cases. After an equivalent period, Germany suffered only 8,863 casualties. Scaling up the German population of 83.7 million to America’s 331 million, a U.S.-sized Germany would have suffered 35,049 Covid-19 deaths. So if the U.S. had acted as effectively as Germany, 70% of U.S. coronavirus deaths might have been prevented.
Seventy percent, though, is the most conservative estimate. Scaled-up versions of South Korea, Australia, and Singapore would have experienced 1,758, 1,324, and 1,358 deaths, respectively, in the four months after 15 cases were confirmed in each country. Had we handled the coronavirus as effectively as any of these three countries, roughly 99% of the 117,858 U.S. Covid-19 deaths might have been averted.
