The Problem With Trump's Testing Plan

declared a global pandemic. Our main story, the goal of widespread testing, seems to finally be one the White House is taking seriously. President Donald Trump announced a comprehensive testing plan on Monday, but the country is already months into a testing crisis that may be too far gone to fix. It leaves open the question can the US prepare itself for the next phase. But first, here's what happened today.

After an outrage about how funds for a government relief program for small businesses were dispersed, the government says it will keep a close eye on who's getting the money and whether they need it. U s. Treasury Secretary Stephen Menuchin said the government will audit every small business loan of more than two million dollars under the Paycheck Protection Program. In the first round of funds from the p p P, large amounts went to big public companies and chains. Menu

Chan's comments came in a CNBC interview today. Some American car manufacturing is revving up again. Ford said it intends to restart initial production at most of its main European plants starting May fourth. The company said manufacturing will resume in a phased approach, and employees will receive personal care kits, including masks and thermometers. Finally, President Donald Trump plans to

order meat processing plants to remain open. According to a person familiar with the matter, the government will provide additional protective gear for employees, as well as guidance. The order comes under the Defense Production Act, which gives a president

broad powers to direct industrial production in a crisis. The order sets the stage for a showdown between America's meat giants, who have been pressing to reopen plants, and local officials and labor unions who say the government is not protecting workers across the country. At least six hundred meat processing employees have either tested positive for the disease or had

to go into self quarantine. According to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the largest private sector union, twenty workers have died and now our main story. The Trump administration announced a plan yesterday to ramp up coronavirus testing. The White House said its goal was to provide enough tests to allow every state to test at least two percent of residents. But even as it announces a new commitment to testing, the federal government has pushed much of

the responsibility to states. Because of the lack of federal leadership on testing, experts say the result has been a free for all among states who are all desperate to get their hands on tests. The competition drives up prices, eats up time, and ultimately dictates how many tests can do. And the Court in John Tazzi has both reported on the difficult logistics required to mount a meaningful testing operation. I talked to them to understand how prepared we really

are to scale up widespread testing. Why is testing so important for COVID nineteen? So usually when we think about testing, you think of it in the scenario that you're sick, but It actually has a really tremendous kind of importance when you think about the health of our communities and our states and the country, because you if you someone is sick, you want to make sure that they are not kind of out in the community and going to the grocery store and seeing their friends and things like that,

because that's how this disease spreads. So testing has a really important role when you think about kind of public health and and you know, preventing this infection from spreading further and preventing sort of a second wave of infections. You know, so many people are social distancing right now, and that's really really important, but testing is actually even more important when people sort of relax the social distancing as we're starting to see sort of happen, you know

in states all around the US right now. Who oversees how and to what extent communities are tested for coronavirus. Yeah, so the testing landscape is incredibly fractured. Um. You know, we talk about US testing like it's one monolithic entity, but it's actually carried out by a ton of different actors around the country. Commercial labs like Quest Diagnostics and lab COREP do a lot of the testing, but you're

also seeing you know, hospitals do testing. You're seeing state public health labs do testing in a in a given state or area. So there's been a lot of criticism of the White House since they put out some guidelines about states reopening about ten days or so ago, and public health experts saying, we need a sharper focus on testing. Testing is what's going to really be key and getting us out of this situation and allowing economies to reopen. And so we saw this come out of the White House,

you know, yesterday, is saying testing is important. Here's our plan. We're gonna try to help, uh, you know, states test better. But they're still really putting this emphasis on the states leading the charge. And so we're hearing public health experts say this is great that there's a new focus on testing, but the federal government needs to be involved more, you know, as sort of the link the link and the key kind of authority that that can kind of act between

states and across states. You know, what are some of the things that they're able to do that states individually can't do with regard to testing. A big thing we've been hearing from labs around the country is we need you to really coordinate the sort of division of supplies

among different labs. So a big problem facing labs and inhibiting how much testing they can do has been you know, one lab maybe doesn't have enough jobs to take the samples to do the testing, the diagnostic testing for COVID nineteen. Let's say, another lab maybe is having trouble getting the

right re agents needed to process the testing. Um. You know, some labs are struggling with getting enough protective equipment, which has been an issue not just in hospitals but also in labs, because labs also need to protect their people, you know, from getting this infection. So we're seeing labs say, the divisions of these supplies around the country are very uneven. You know, some people have too much, some people have

too little. So what exactly is the Trump administration doing about testing and and what has led so much criticism of their approach. So it's important to say that the Trump administration is aware of these issues, aware of the supply chain problems you know, involved, and trying to to

make some differences in these sort of challenges. The real thing that has been sort of a persistent criticism of the Trump administration has been this sort of the fact that they came out with this guideline, these guidelines the other week for reopening state economies, saying this is how we measure it, this is how we know if a

state is prepared to reopen. But by the way, these guidelines are voluntary, and these guidelines talked about testing, but they didn't set specific goals in terms of testing, leading to a lot of criticism that the Trump administration wasn't stressing testing enough in terms of its talking about reopening.

So fast forward to this week on Monday, you're having more states talking about reopening, pressing towards reopening, and the Trump administration is putting out that same day new guidelines about testing, sort of outlining what they've done so far and saying, you know, testing is important. Deborah Burkes, who's a top medical advisor to the administration, has been involved in talking to lab directors about the situations in their lab.

There's one diagnostic manufacturer that has actually too much supply of their testing product, and she's trying to figure out why aren't labs using this product. So they're out there they're listening to these problems. But you know, you also have the President repeatedly stressing that we have enough testing capacity right now, and experts say that's just not true. John, you wrote about contact tracing. Explain what contact tracing is

and what it has to do with testing. Yeah, so, contact tracing is something that public health departments have done for decades. It's sort of bread and butter detective work to understand how diseases are spreading and to really stop that transmission. We're hearing a lot more about it now because of the coronavirus, and the idea behind it is, you know, if you have someone who has an infectious disease, you know they may be in contact with a number

of other people who are susceptible to that disease. With the coronavirus, they may have those contacts before they even realize they were sick themselves, or they may never realize that they were sick because they were asymptomatic. So the idea behind contact tracing as you find out all the people who may have been in touch with someone who is infected and might have transmitted the disease to and

then you monitor them. In the case of COVID nineteen, you ask them to isolate for fourteen days to see if they develop symptoms. If they do, you know that that person may have infected others. So you kind of repeat the process case by case, chasing down their contacts, asking people to isolate, finding out who that who else they might have been in touch with. And that's really what's UM essential to breaking the chains of transmission for

the virus. So your article focuses on a new software UM that's that's being developed and currently being implemented, called Sarah Alert, And I was wondering if you might just explain how does sarah alert work. It's really a tool for public health to kind of track and isolate people who may have of COVID nineteen or people who may

have been exposed. So, uh, you know, when a public health worker gets UM, they basically developed lists of UM contacts from known cases, right, all the people that you may have been UH in touch with in the period when you were potentially infectious and spreading the virus. Those contacts are entered into a system. Health workers reach out to them and ask if they've experienced any symptoms, and you know, may recommend testing or treatment based on their answers.

Whether software basically does automate much of the process of checking in on them. They can decide whether they want to be contacted by text message, by email, by voice call, and then every day they are contacted automatically UM they're asked to report symptoms. People who do report symptoms get flagged for public health workers that they may need more follow up, and people who don't respond at all also get flagged UM that they may need a human intervention.

So basically it it's kind of automates much of the manual work done by public health departments. Right now, and who is using SARAH alert? So the first three UM places to start using it in April where the State of Arkansas, the city of Danbury, Connecticut, and the Territory of the Northern Mariana Islands uh A, US Commonwealth in Pacific.

And you know, those were I think chosen as sort of test cases so they would have it in you know, three very different types of jurisdictions, A state, local, and a territory. So how do these two different prongs of

testing inform each other? Testing itself and contact tracing? Yeah, I think I mean both are important, right, I mean I think one one without the other is probably not going to get us there, and there's lots of sort of basic public health activity around testing and contact tracing um that we need to do, and we need to do much better and much faster, I think, than than

we have you know, in the United States. This is work that's sort of distributed across many different local, county, state government entities, and some are better equipped to do it than others, and I think, you know, they're all being kind of strained by the current situation. So you know, the scale of the undertaking ahead is pretty astonishing, and you know, we're we're sort of still finding out where those stress points and fractures in the system and our

ability to respond. Our that was Bloomberg Reporters and the Court and John Tazzi, and that's our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review in a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The

Prognosis Daily Edition is hosted by me Laura Carlson. The show was produced by Me tophor Foreheaz, Jordan Gospoure, and Magnus Hendrickson. Today's main story was reported by Emma Court and John Tozzi. Original music by Leo Sidrian. Our editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.