Trump suggests coronavirus testing is no longer a problem. Governors disagree.

President Trump on Monday expressed optimism about the federal government’s ability to provide adequate testing for the coronavirus and suggested it would soon be producing so many ventilators, masks and other personal protective equipment that it would be able to send stocks of supplies to other countries.

America’s governors painted a different picture on the ground.

In a conference call with governors on Monday, President Trump said that he “hasn’t heard about testing in weeks,” suggesting that a chronic lack of kits to test people for the coronavirus is no longer a problem. Yet one governor said his state was “one day away” from not being able to test anyone at all.

Hours later, Mr. Trump’s comments at a White House Rose Garden news conference suggested he thought the scarcity of ventilators and other supplies, which has become an emergency in some states, will soon be ending.


But in New York, where the state’s deaths from the coronavirus jumped above 1,200 and a hospital ship arrived to ease the pressure on overwhelmed hospitals, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo warned that the worst of the coronavirus outbreak was yet to come.

“You have to prepare before the storm hits. And in this case the storm is when you hit that high point, when you hit that apex,” the governor said. “How do you know when you’re going to get there? You don’t.”

In Virginia, Maryland and Arizona, governors from both parties issued new stay-home orders for their citizens.

In Washington, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency approval permitting the use of two long-used malaria drugs to treat coronavirus patients, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said in an interview that it was only a matter of time before Congress would act on a fourth relief measure to try to contain the economic fallout of an outbreak that now sees three of four Americans under orders to stay home.

“This isn’t about how fast we can do it,” she said. “It’s how fast we must do it.”

And in the nation’s jails, prisoners worried about their health as they wiped down communal phones with prized alcohol wipes and washed down cell bars and table tops with diluted shampoo.

Reference: NY Times