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| © Brittany Greeson for The New York Times A coronavirus testing site in Detroit at the end of March. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan said the state could handle “double or triple” the number of tests if only it had needed materials. |
By Rick Rojas, The New York Times
ATLANTA — Governors facing growing pressure to revive economies decimated by the coronavirus said on Sunday that a shortage of tests was among the most significant hurdles in the way of lifting restrictions in their states.
“We are fighting a biological war,” Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “We have been asked as governors to fight that war without the supplies we need.”
In interviews on Sunday morning talk shows, Mr. Northam was among the governors who said they needed the swabs and reagents required for the test, and urged federal officials to help them get those supplies.
The governors bristled at claims from the Trump administration that the supply of tests was adequate. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Mike Pence said “there is a sufficient capacity of testing across the country today for any state in America” to go to the first of three phases that the administration says are needed for the country to emerge from the coronavirus shutdown.
Mr. Northam, a Democrat, called Mr. Pence’s claim “delusional.” In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, also a Democrat, said the state could perform “double or triple” the number of tests it is doing now “if we had the swabs or reagents.” Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, said that it was “absolutely false” to claim that governors were not acting aggressively enough to pursue as much testing as possible.
ATLANTA — Governors facing growing pressure to revive economies decimated by the coronavirus said on Sunday that a shortage of tests was among the most significant hurdles in the way of lifting restrictions in their states.
“We are fighting a biological war,” Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “We have been asked as governors to fight that war without the supplies we need.”
In interviews on Sunday morning talk shows, Mr. Northam was among the governors who said they needed the swabs and reagents required for the test, and urged federal officials to help them get those supplies.
The governors bristled at claims from the Trump administration that the supply of tests was adequate. On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Vice President Mike Pence said “there is a sufficient capacity of testing across the country today for any state in America” to go to the first of three phases that the administration says are needed for the country to emerge from the coronavirus shutdown.
Mr. Northam, a Democrat, called Mr. Pence’s claim “delusional.” In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, also a Democrat, said the state could perform “double or triple” the number of tests it is doing now “if we had the swabs or reagents.” Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, said that it was “absolutely false” to claim that governors were not acting aggressively enough to pursue as much testing as possible.
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| © Johnny Milano for The New York Times Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York at a news conference on Sunday. |
“It’s not accurate to say there’s plenty of testing out there, and the governors should just get it done,” Mr. Hogan said on “State of the Union.” “That’s just not being straightforward.”
The conflicting messages come as the debate over how and when to reopen the economy has intensified. President Trump on Saturday expressed his confidence in the nation’s testing capability and said some governors have “gotten carried away,” while state officials said they feared moving too early could cause the virus to flare again.
“As tough as this moment is,” Ms. Whitmer said in an interview with CNN, “it would be devastating to have a second wave.”
In a news conference on Sunday evening, Mr. Trump expressed his confidence in the federal response, including his administration’s relationship with governors and the capacity for testing.
Mr. Trump said the administration was preparing to use the Defense Production Act to compel one U.S. facility to increase production of test swabs by over 20 million per month. The announcement came after he defended his response to the accusations that there was an insufficient amount of testing to justify reopening the economy any time soon.
“You’ll have so many swabs you won’t know what to do with them,” Mr. Trump said.
Officials at every level have faced increasingly competing pressures, balancing maintaining stay-at-home orders against the exasperation and economic toll they are producing. On Saturday and Sunday, modest protests took place in several cities across the country, where demonstrators flouted social distancing rules as they demanded that restrictions be relaxed.
Yet there was also a widespread sense that much of the public understood the governors’ concerns and shared them. Nearly 60 percent of American voters said they were worried that measures would be relaxed too soon, causing deaths to rise, according to a new poll from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal.
Officials in various states said they had started staging plans for reopening their economies and were working in concert with neighboring states in determining when to lift restrictions.
In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster said that he had spoken with the governors of other southeastern states, including Florida and Tennessee. “Told them South Carolina was ready,” Mr. McMaster, a Republican, said on Twitter on Saturday.
On Sunday, governors from across the Northeast, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, said they were creating a regional council focused on restoring the economy and addressing unemployment.
Still, many governors, including Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, said that testing still needed to be ramped up considerably before moving forward, and that they needed federal help to do so.
There are currently about 150,000 diagnostic tests conducted each day, according to the Covid Tracking Project. Researchers at Harvard estimated last week that in order to ease restrictions, the nation needed to at least triple that pace of testing.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House, also pushed back against criticism that not enough people were being tested, saying that not every community required high levels of testing and that tens of thousands of test results were probably not being reported.
“We need to predict community by community the testing that is needed,” Dr. Birx said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Each will have a different testing need, and that’s what we’re calculating now.”
On the ABC program “This Week,” Dr. Birx said she thought statistics on testing were incomplete: “When you look at the number of cases that have been diagnosed, you realize that there’s probably 30,000 to 50,000 additional tests being done that aren’t being reported right now.”
Shortages of supplies have restricted the pace of testing, according to commercial laboratories. Dr. Birx said that a team at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was calling hundreds of labs around the country to determine exactly what supplies they need “to turn on full capacity, which we believe will double the number of tests that are available for Americans.”
In the news conference on Saturday, Mr. Trump said the criticism of the administration was driven by Democrats. “Unfortunately, some partisan voices are trying to politicize the issue of testing,” he said.
Yet, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington noted that governors from both parties had been among those voicing frustration over a lack of federal support with testing. He also criticized what he saw as a discordant message from Mr. Trump, which, he argued, undermined governors’ stay-at-home orders and inspired “people to ignore things that actually can save their lives.”
“These orders actually are the law of these states,” Mr. Inslee, a Democrat, said in an interview with “This Week.” He added: “And, again, these are not just Democrats. These are Republican-led states as well. To have an American president to encourage people to violate the law, I can’t remember any time during my time in America where we have seen such a thing.”
Now, with states transitioning away from addressing the peak of the pandemic, governors stand to face a difficult landscape to navigate.
Governors across the political spectrum have stepped into the spotlight during the coronavirus crisis, holding daily news briefings and going back and forth with the president. But if they drew praise for taking quick action to protect public health, taking responsibility for when and how to reopen could prove far more politically perilous, said Ray Scheppach, a public policy professor at the University of Virginia and a former longtime executive director of the National Governors Association.
“That is one of the reasons you’re seeing groups of governors and states get together,” he said, noting the alliances made by clusters of governors around the country.
“Doing something with the surrounding states does give you a certain amount of political cover,” both with constituents and the White House, Professor Scheppach said. “They don’t want to get pushed around by this president and they are stronger in a group.”
Having claimed responsibility for reopening the country, governors are now offering hesitant timelines. Offering no date for reopening may leave people feeling despondent at a time when “people need more certainty as opposed to less,” Professor Scheppach said. But being too firm comes with the risk of having to push out deadlines and test the public’s patience.
“You can do it once,” he said, as Mr. Cuomo and others have done. “But you begin to lose if you do that two or three times.”
Governors said they had become acutely aware of the dilemmas they face.
In his appearance on CNN, Mr. Hogan was shown footage of a long line winding around a supermarket in a Maryland suburb of Washington where free food was being handed out. The video was an unsettling avatar of the economic damage wrought by the virus. He said he shared in the frustration over the economy, but he also noted that his state had not yet reached its peak in cases.
“My goal is to try to get us open as quickly as we possibly can,” he said, “but in a safe way.”
See more at The New York Times
The conflicting messages come as the debate over how and when to reopen the economy has intensified. President Trump on Saturday expressed his confidence in the nation’s testing capability and said some governors have “gotten carried away,” while state officials said they feared moving too early could cause the virus to flare again.
“As tough as this moment is,” Ms. Whitmer said in an interview with CNN, “it would be devastating to have a second wave.”
In a news conference on Sunday evening, Mr. Trump expressed his confidence in the federal response, including his administration’s relationship with governors and the capacity for testing.
Mr. Trump said the administration was preparing to use the Defense Production Act to compel one U.S. facility to increase production of test swabs by over 20 million per month. The announcement came after he defended his response to the accusations that there was an insufficient amount of testing to justify reopening the economy any time soon.
“You’ll have so many swabs you won’t know what to do with them,” Mr. Trump said.
Officials at every level have faced increasingly competing pressures, balancing maintaining stay-at-home orders against the exasperation and economic toll they are producing. On Saturday and Sunday, modest protests took place in several cities across the country, where demonstrators flouted social distancing rules as they demanded that restrictions be relaxed.
Yet there was also a widespread sense that much of the public understood the governors’ concerns and shared them. Nearly 60 percent of American voters said they were worried that measures would be relaxed too soon, causing deaths to rise, according to a new poll from NBC News and The Wall Street Journal.
Officials in various states said they had started staging plans for reopening their economies and were working in concert with neighboring states in determining when to lift restrictions.
In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster said that he had spoken with the governors of other southeastern states, including Florida and Tennessee. “Told them South Carolina was ready,” Mr. McMaster, a Republican, said on Twitter on Saturday.
On Sunday, governors from across the Northeast, including New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, said they were creating a regional council focused on restoring the economy and addressing unemployment.
Still, many governors, including Andrew M. Cuomo of New York and Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, said that testing still needed to be ramped up considerably before moving forward, and that they needed federal help to do so.
There are currently about 150,000 diagnostic tests conducted each day, according to the Covid Tracking Project. Researchers at Harvard estimated last week that in order to ease restrictions, the nation needed to at least triple that pace of testing.
Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House, also pushed back against criticism that not enough people were being tested, saying that not every community required high levels of testing and that tens of thousands of test results were probably not being reported.
“We need to predict community by community the testing that is needed,” Dr. Birx said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Each will have a different testing need, and that’s what we’re calculating now.”
On the ABC program “This Week,” Dr. Birx said she thought statistics on testing were incomplete: “When you look at the number of cases that have been diagnosed, you realize that there’s probably 30,000 to 50,000 additional tests being done that aren’t being reported right now.”
Shortages of supplies have restricted the pace of testing, according to commercial laboratories. Dr. Birx said that a team at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center was calling hundreds of labs around the country to determine exactly what supplies they need “to turn on full capacity, which we believe will double the number of tests that are available for Americans.”
In the news conference on Saturday, Mr. Trump said the criticism of the administration was driven by Democrats. “Unfortunately, some partisan voices are trying to politicize the issue of testing,” he said.
Yet, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington noted that governors from both parties had been among those voicing frustration over a lack of federal support with testing. He also criticized what he saw as a discordant message from Mr. Trump, which, he argued, undermined governors’ stay-at-home orders and inspired “people to ignore things that actually can save their lives.”
“These orders actually are the law of these states,” Mr. Inslee, a Democrat, said in an interview with “This Week.” He added: “And, again, these are not just Democrats. These are Republican-led states as well. To have an American president to encourage people to violate the law, I can’t remember any time during my time in America where we have seen such a thing.”
Now, with states transitioning away from addressing the peak of the pandemic, governors stand to face a difficult landscape to navigate.
Governors across the political spectrum have stepped into the spotlight during the coronavirus crisis, holding daily news briefings and going back and forth with the president. But if they drew praise for taking quick action to protect public health, taking responsibility for when and how to reopen could prove far more politically perilous, said Ray Scheppach, a public policy professor at the University of Virginia and a former longtime executive director of the National Governors Association.
“That is one of the reasons you’re seeing groups of governors and states get together,” he said, noting the alliances made by clusters of governors around the country.
“Doing something with the surrounding states does give you a certain amount of political cover,” both with constituents and the White House, Professor Scheppach said. “They don’t want to get pushed around by this president and they are stronger in a group.”
Having claimed responsibility for reopening the country, governors are now offering hesitant timelines. Offering no date for reopening may leave people feeling despondent at a time when “people need more certainty as opposed to less,” Professor Scheppach said. But being too firm comes with the risk of having to push out deadlines and test the public’s patience.
“You can do it once,” he said, as Mr. Cuomo and others have done. “But you begin to lose if you do that two or three times.”
Governors said they had become acutely aware of the dilemmas they face.
In his appearance on CNN, Mr. Hogan was shown footage of a long line winding around a supermarket in a Maryland suburb of Washington where free food was being handed out. The video was an unsettling avatar of the economic damage wrought by the virus. He said he shared in the frustration over the economy, but he also noted that his state had not yet reached its peak in cases.
“My goal is to try to get us open as quickly as we possibly can,” he said, “but in a safe way.”
See more at The New York Times
