The country faces the same problem today it did two months ago: There are not enough tests to contain the virus.
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The United States is mired in one of the most immiserating peacetime moments in its history. In little more than two months, more than 70,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, a disease that did not have a name in early February. The U. S. economy, which began the year as an engine of global stability, is in shambles. The unemployment rate has surged to a level unseen since the 1930s, the Labor Department announced this morning. Only about half of American adults have a job, the lowest share of the population employed since measurements began in 1948.
There is one way out of the mess: To fix the economy, the country must solve the public-health crisis. Survey data show that the economic turmoil is driven not primarily by government shelter-in-place policies but by Americans’ fear that going outside will result in illness.
To allow the recovery to begin, the United States must implement the kind of strategy that other countries have used to defeat the coronavirus. It must test widely to find infected people, trace their contacts who might themselves have been infected, and isolate that potentially infectious group from the rest of the susceptible population. Setting up this kind of infrastructure was one of the initial goals of the social-distancing measures that states and cities started in March.
Yet so far the country has failed to do so. More than 10 weeks into the coronavirus crisis, still too few Americans are being tested for the coronavirus, and the country’s testing capacity is not growing fast enough, according to data collected by the COVID Tracking Project, a volunteer initiative housed within The Atlantic. This week, the U. S. tested about 264,000 people a day, the highest level in the pandemic so far. But experts say that if the country hopes to get its outbreak under control, it must double or triple the number of daily tests. Some propose expanding testing more than 75-fold.
But to an almost astonishing degree, the U. S. has no national plan for achieving this goal. There is no effort at the federal level that has mustered anything like the funding, coordination, or real resources that experts across the political spectrum say is needed to safely reopen the county.
“Testing is your first fundamental step in a plan to keep infected people from susceptible people,” Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told me yesterday. But the federal government has failed to expand testing capacity in any meaningful way, he said.
“There’s a strong sense that the White House knows the amount of testing we need is far more than we have right now,” he said, though senior Trump officials have insisted that the country’s testing supply is adequate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the country’s foremost public-health agency, has been almost “totally useless” on testing, he said. “It is really stunning and disappointing.”
Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, also struggled to articulate the lack of any federal plan this week.
For the past few months, Rivers has helped write a series of reports for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, about how to reopen the economy amid the pandemic. But testifying to Congress on Wednesday, she emphasized how little those plans had been followed and how much work remained to be done.
