Lev Facher writes in STAT that the Trump administration on Monday unveiled a “blueprint” to increase capacity for coronavirus tests nationwide, the latest step in the White House’s effort to help states gradually roll back dramatic lockdown measures.
While the blueprint itself contains few specifics, a number of private companies, including CVS and Walgreens, pledged to work with the federal government to quickly add capacity to conduct millions of tests per month. Top Trump health aides pledged at Monday’s White House briefing that the new effort would create capacity to conduct as many as 2 million tests per week by the end of May to “give the American people confidence that we can reopen and get our economy moving again,” Vice President Mike Pence said.
The 2-million-tests-per-week pledge would represent a dramatic testing capacity increase for the U.S., where roughly 5.4 million coronavirus tests have been conducted to date. Yet it also represents the low end of what many public health officials estimate the country will require to safely reopen, according to an analysis conducted by STAT and leading public health officials. Other leading researchers have estimated that for most Americans to safely return to work, testing capacity might need to reach between 3 and 4 million per week.