United States President Donald Trump said that coronavirus mass testing will not happen in the country.
This is what Trump suggested after Jim Acosta of CNN asked the president during the White House coronavirus task force's news briefing on Thursday if the United States could still return to normal even without sufficient testing system, which covers nationwide testing and monitoring.
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Trump seemed to have understood it as a question on whether a coronavirus mass testing can happen all over the country.
"We want to have it and we're going to see if we have it. Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes. We're talking about 325 million people and that's not gonna happen, as you can imagine, and it would never happen with anyone else, either," the President said.
"Other countries do it, but they do it in a limited form. We'll probably be the leader of the pack," he added.
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Trump noted there would be "massive testing" in "certain areas" of the country. Meanwhile, Vice President Mike Pence would not directly state if there are enough coronavirus tests that can be accessed right now to reopen the country.
Moreover, Trump claimed that there have been more than two million coronavirus tests conducted in the United States.
"I'm reporting today that we passed two million tests completed in the United States," Trump said during the Thursday briefing, emphasizing that the tests are "highly sophisticated and highly accurate."
The President has been cheering about the rising number of coronavirus tests held in the U.S. since the the country exceeded South Korea's numbers last month as the country with the highest number of tests administered.
However, compared to South Korea, the U.S. has performed far fewer tests per capita since the American population is more than six times larger than South Korea's.
Epidemiologists use rates like tests per capita when making a comparison of different countries.
"I think the important clarification is that we should be considering the number of cases per 1 million population and considering a rate of people tested and not the absolute numbers," said Jennifer Horney, founding director of the University of Delaware's epidemiology program. "The absolute number of tests is not very meaningful."
When asked by Acosta if the U.S. could provide an adequate testing capacity to make Americans feel comfortable about returning to normalcy, Pence said, "We are moving every day toward meeting that moment."
He clarified that reopening the country will be decided based on a number of factors.
"First would be that we are at the end of the coronavirus for most major communities," Pence said. "Another piece of that is that we have therapeutics for Americans to take medicines if they contract the disease. Another piece of that is guidance from the CDC to public institutions, to businesses large and small about how to conduct themselves in a safe and a responsible way. And testing is also a piece of that."
Pence noted that more tests are being held across the country every day, and surveillance testing is also being conducted in addition to diagnostic testing.
