The U.S. faces the same problem it did two months ago: There aren’t enough tests to contain the coronavirus
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 on Friday. 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 country. [Continue reading…]