The United States has lagged in testing for COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. Mick Mulvaney who was a former skeptic of the threat of COVID-19 had his son tested for the virus and he said, “I know it isn’t popular to talk about in some Republican circles, but, we still have a testing problem in this country. My son was recently tested and we had to wait 5-7 days for results. My daughter wanted to get tested before visiting her grandparents and she was told, she didn’t qualify. That is simply inexcusable at this point in the pandemic.”
Every problem experienced since the start of the pandemic relates to an inadequate response to testing. The CDC in the beginning sent out flawed tests which simply did not work. Private labs were hampered by bureaucratic regulations. It took over a month for another test to be made and approved for use but by that the the virus had spread exponentially across the county. Only 472 people in total were tested in the U.S. during the same time frame that South Korea, with one-sixth the population of the U.S., had completed 55,000 tests.
Far worse, the former president specifically wanted to slow testing down since he felt the numbers didn’t look good for his re-election chances. John Oliver said, “Had testing caught the cases in this country early, we could have managed the virus through contract tracing and targeted quarantine, but that did not happen. So the virus spread widely, forcing us to use the blunt instrument of making everyone stay at home. A lack of testing goes to the very heart of how we got into this situation, and the truth is, broad testing is our only safe way out of it.” He continued, “At a minimum, the U.S. needs to be testing 500,000 people a day, but a good target would be 35 million a day. Currently, only 200,000 people are being tested on a daily basis.
Today case numbers continue to creep upward at about the levels of last summers horrific surge. America is like the frog in a pan slowly being boiled. The numbers have fallen since January so most people are lulled into a sense that the worse is over. They think life can return to normal. However we are still being boiled alive. Hundreds of thousand have died preventable deaths.