US coronavirus testing may reach five million a day, President Donald Trump said during his White House briefing on Tuesday.
The President made this announcement as the lack of testing hinders many states from reopening businesses.
A reporter asked Trump if is confident the US can run five million coronavirus tests per day. “We’ll increase it, and it’ll increase it by much more than that in the very near future,” Trump said.
Reports show that the US is still far from conducting five million tests a day. The most tests the country held on a single day was 314,182 on April 22. This is based on the data from the Covid Tracking Project.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has run 5.7 million total COVID-19 tests since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the volunteer project that can track testing data.
The project suggests that at the average rate of around 157,000 tests run a day in April, it would take six years to test everyone in the US.
However, there is a need to rest health-care workers and other first responders often. New York state requires private companies to test their employees frequently if they are returning to work.
"Very soon"
Trump told reporters “we’re going to be there very soon.” He does not have the exact information off the top of his head, but “if you look at the numbers, it could be that we’re getting very close.”
Last week, Trump and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo agreed to testing 40,000 people a day across the state. “It’s a very aggressive goal,” Cuomo said.
According to CNBC, if every state in the country held 40,000 tests daily, that would total 2 million tests per day. It remains far below the five million that Trump said he will exceed in the “very near future.”
State officials including Cuomo expressed concern about shortages of supplies necessary to improve testing. These include the coronavirus test kits themselves, reagents, and swabs.
Public health specialists and state officials stressed that testing capacity for COVID-19 is key to prevent a resurgence of the virus. This concern comes as states ease restrictions and reopen businesses.
The White House’s official testing data reported that 5.1 million Americans were tested as of Monday, up from 3.3 million on April 15.
“The United States has done double the number of tests of any country in the world,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said.
“We have exceeded all expectations and continue to lead the world in testing capacity as we assist governors in ensuring they have the capacity to reopen their states in a safe manner.”
“States, not the Federal Government, should be doing the Testing,” Trump said in a tweet last week.
Adm. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said that the US would hold 27 million tests by the end of March. On April 20, Giroir pointed out that there were already 40 million tests “in the marketplace.” However, that labs were not processing the tests due to supplies shortages and other issues.
