The president claims he was 'given a set of circumstances' that wasn't meant for the high numbers of potentially COVID-19 infections.
President Donald Trump refused to accept any responsibility for the slow rate of coronavirus testing in the United States, saying on Friday that he was "given a set of circumstances" that wasn't meant for the high numbers of potential COVID-19 infections.
During the briefing, NBC's Kristen Welker asked Trump whether he took responsibility for the testing lag, which one member of his own task force called "a failing." During the earliest stages of the outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention distributed faulty tests to state and local health departments. Once the flawed tests were discovered and discarded, bureaucratic red tape held up the process of granting exemptions to private labs to make their own tests.
"If you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this, they didn't do testing like this, and they lost approximately 14,000 people. They started thinking about testing when it was far too late," Trump said. "The Obama administration made a decision on testing that turned out to be very detrimental to what we're doing, and we undid that decision a few days ago so that the testing can take place in a much more accurate and rapid fashion," Trump said at a White House meeting with airline executives in early March.
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