Dr. Fauci Says U.S. Has To ‘Significantly Ramp Up’ Testing for Coronavirus

April 24, 2020 (EIRNS)—Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told Time magazine yesterday that the U.S. has to “significantly ramp up” its testing for coronavirus, if we are to control the COVID-19 pandemic and meet the Trump Administration’s objective of science-based, cautious lifting of stay-at-home and other containment measures in the period ahead.

“I agree you don’t need to test everybody, but you should at least be able to test the people in which you have to test to be able to do containment, and right now I think there’s still some gaps there. I mean, on paper it might look okay, but we absolutely need to significantly ramp up not only the number of tests, but the capacity to actually perform them.”

He added: “I am not overly confident right now at all that we have what it takes to do that. We’re doing better, and I think we’re going to get there, but we’re not there yet.”

About one million tests per week are now being performed in the United States. Fauci agreed with other experts who say that “closer to 3 million” are needed per week right now, and that “you may need multiple times that as you get into the late Spring and early Summer. For goodness sakes, when we get into the Fall, after all of those months, we better have multiple times that.”

At today’s White House press briefing, which in this case was not attended by Dr. Fauci, President Trump was of course aggressively asked by the press hyenas about Fauci’s remarks earlier in the day. To which Trump responded curtly: “I don’t agree. No, I don’t agree with him. If Fauci said that, I don’t agree with him.” Trump went on to recount how much testing the U.S. has done, which is more than every nation in the world, and noted that more tests are on the way.

Fauci had been asked by Time about the “reports”—i.e. press rumors—that Trump was considering firing him, since Trump had re-tweeted a post with the hashtag “firefauci.” Fauci responded:

“Well, you know, I meet with the President literally every day, and, you know, there was no way he was going to do that, because he had no intention of doing that. I mean, he tweeted it out, but as he said publicly when they asked him about that, that’s not even on the table.... As much as there’s a lot of noise out there about agreements or disagreements, in fact the evidence-based recommendations in the end will always prevail,”