https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/coronavirus-media-wrong-about-trump-testing-strategy/
How we ramped up coronavirus testing.
The White House had the idea of opening hundreds of ambitious mobile testing sites at the outset of the coronavirus crisis. But there was a problem: Officials quickly realized that creating that many sites would use up an inordinate amount of the nation’s limited supply of testing swabs.
“We had 1.2 million swabs in the country for the month for everything,” recalls Admiral Brett Giroir, the HHS official who became the administration’s testing czar in mid-March and soon will be returning to his regular duties.
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That number wasn’t going to come close to meeting the need, and it wasn’t clear how the gap would be made up. “We thought there were eight or ten suppliers of swabs,” says Giroir, “because they came under different packages, but when you found out about it, these were really repackaged swabs. There were really only two sources of these rare kinds of swabs.” One was based in Italy, the other a small company in Maine called Puritan.
“Now,” he continues, “we couldn’t get anything out of Italy because it was locked down. Literally, in those first couple days the Air Force sent a C-17 to Italy to physically go get the swabs and bring them back to the U.S.”
The swab crunch in March was just one of the obstacles to clearing the way for what needed to be an unprecedented ramp-up in testing to address the COVID crisis.
“When we first started peeking under the covers,” says Giroir, “we were going to do in two or three weeks, even early on, what the country does in a year on other sophisticated molecular tests.”
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The story of how the country went from nothing to more than half-a-million COVID tests on some days is a tale of inspired private–public cooperation. After bad initial stumbles when the Centers for Disease Control fouled up the initial test (at a time when it had a monopoly on testing) and when a Food and Drug Administration regulatory bottleneck stymied the development of testing in the private sector, the administration found its footing.
It used cooperative data, governmental authorities, relationships with the private sector, and improvisation-on-the-fly to work through supply shortages and other problems. Giroir’s team, a group of trouble-shooting aides around White House adviser Jared Kushner, the FDA, and the Department of Health and Human Services all played important roles. Meanwhile, private companies — often working hand-and-glove with the administration — quickly innovated and scaled up their production of everything from swabs to test kits.
At the beginning of March, there were fewer than 1,000 tests in the country on most days. By the end of March, there were more than 100,000 a day. The number climbed again before hovering somewhere around 150,000 a day for much of April.
Then it bumped up again, to more than 200,000 at the end of the month. It surpassed 400,000 for the first time on May 17. On May 29, it was nearly 500,000. It’s been in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 most days since, with a high of more than 580,000 just this just Friday.
