Trump is blaming the uptick of coronavirus cases on an increase in coronavirus testing
Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images Three months since the president declared a national emergency over the greatest public health crisis in decades, he still does not understand the basic mechanisms for analyzing and controling the pandemic. On Monday, President Trump blamed the current surge in cases in over a dozen states on testing, rather than the increased exposure of a return to normal — or normal-ish — life.
It’s a bold statement ignoring the basic function of science during the coronavirus shutdown, even for a president who has willfully ignored and actively dismantled pandemic response procedures since the beginning of the crisis. Put simply, testing is not the cause of the post-Memorial Day surge, but an essential part of mitigating the spread of the virus, allowing local, state, and federal officials to determine where to treat hotspots so that they don’t become major outbreaks.
The low-information message — there wouldn’t be any cases if we didn’t test for cases — is consistent both with the president’s larger anti-science commitment and his administration’s gross failures on testing in the early days of the pandemic, which caused the United States to fall substantially behind other countries whose responses had the benefit of massive testing rates and universal health-care.
President Trump isn’t the only figure in the administration casting doubt on the usefulness of high testing rates either — despite his promise in April that he would increase U.S. testing to 5 million conducted per day. At the same event on Monday, Vice-President Mike Pence agreed with Trump, saying that the spike in cases can be explained by a “dramatic increase in testing.
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