President Donald Trump on Wednesday provided a brief update on critical health supplies amid the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States and said that the country is now conducting more testing than any other in the world.
“We sent over the last day 4,000 ventilators to New York,” he added.
The president has approved major disaster declarations for New York, California, Washington, Iowa, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. The disaster declarations will allow federal funding to start flowing to state and some local governments, as well as certain private nonprofit organizations.
Trump also said that the United States is “doing more testing than anybody by far,” adding that he had recently spoken with South Korean President Moon Jae-in.
“They’ve done a very good job at testing,” Trump said. “But we now are doing more testing than anybody by far. We do more in eight days than they do in eight weeks. And we go up on a daily basis exponentially.”
“The news, the reporters, the media always like to bring South Korea,” the president said on Thursday. “They [South Korea] called me, they told me ‘it’s amazing, your testing procedures are amazing.' Plus we have a test that’s a very high-level test and it’s a test that’s very accurate.”
‘Ridiculous’ to Test Entire Population: Trump
One reporter asked the president about the possibility of testing all Americans and quarantining of those who need to be isolated, while allowing the rest to return to work.“We have some big problems but confined to certain high-density areas,” Trump said. “Why would we test the entire nation of 350 million people?”
He noted that a lot of states with lower infection numbers “could go back [to work] right now, and they probably will because, at some point in the not too distant future, certain states are going to come off the rolls.”
“Maybe New York can’t and maybe California can’t. Maybe the state of Washington can’t, although if you look at them, their biggest problem was in one nursing home,” he added.
“We have the ability to test, we have come a long way from an obsolete, broken system I inherited. We have tested with the best test, far more than anybody else. When I say anybody else, other countries, no country is even close,” he said.
Self-Swab Tests On The Way
White House Coronavirus Task Force Coordinator Deborah Birx announced on Monday that self-swab COVID-19 tests will be available soon.The tests will allow people to collect their own samples using a nasal swab while self-isolating. They or someone else would then take the sample to an authorized clinical or drive-through testing site and receive their results that same day, making the process simpler and possibly safer.
Confirmed cases of the CCP virus continue to rise in the United States as testing and access to it improves, and as testing centers work to clear a backlog of samples.
