The Urgent Necessity of Testing
By 
The only way to get back to anything remotely resembling normalcy is easily available, reliable mass testing for the virus. Unfortunately, our national government is headed in the other direction:
The state of coronavirus testing in America means that an end to social distancing is likely a long way off.
Two and a half months after the first reported coronavirus case in the US, America still doesn’t have the capacity that it needs to track all cases — a prerequisite for ending social distancing, according to a range of public health experts, health care providers, and private labs.
More testing is a cornerstone of every plan that calls for ending the social distancing measures that have shut down huge swaths of the economy and confined many Americans to their homes. The idea, as outlined in plans from the left-leaning Center for American Progress (CAP) and the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI), is that widespread testing will let public health officials detect and subsequently contain any future outbreaks before everything has to be locked down.
As Jeffrey Martin, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco, put it, “The only way that a society can function is if the brushfires are identified and put out” — before they turn into a wildfire.
There have been some recent improvements in testing capacity, with the reported number of daily tests increasing by tens of thousands in the past two weeks. But experts say the US is still very far from where it needs to be.
As Paul observed today, Trump cannot stop competently run state and local governments to abandon social distancing measures. But federal resources are going to be necessary for mass testing, and Trump literally doesn’t understand why it’s necessary. Whether one of the few lickspittles who can influence him 1)can understand this and 2)convince someone with a time horizon that can typically be measured in seconds about it is a very open question, and a lot of unnecessary misery is going to happen in the meantime.