The United States needs to ramp up its coronavirus testing abilities, but the country may not be able to produce enough tests yet, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“We are not in a situation where we can say we are exactly where we want to be with regard to testing,” Fauci said during an interview with Time Magazine on Thursday.
He continued, “We need to significantly ramp up not only the number of tests, but the capacity to perform them, so that you don’t have a situation where you have a test, but it can’t be done because there isn’t a swab, or because there isn’t extraction media, or not the right vial.”
However, Fauci said he is not “overly confident right now at all” that the U.S. has the ability to get the testing capacity to where he would like it to be. He added, “We are doing better, and I think we are going to get there, but we are not there yet.”
Additionally, Fauci cautioned that states have to be “really careful” about reopening their economies.
He explained, “We must be in a place that we have the capability when we do start to see cases come back — and I guarantee that they will come back as we pull back on social distancing — that we can identify then, isolate them, contact trace people they have been in touch with, and get people out of circulation who are infected. If we are capable of doing that effectively, then we should feel some good confidence that we could slowly move on.”
Lawmakers and governors have repeatedly pressured the federal government to work to ramp up coronavirus testing, as IJR has previously reported.
Members of President Donald Trump’s administration have suggested that the country is conducting enough tests to allow states to reopen. On Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence said that “any state in America” can start to lift its restrictions.
However, several governors pushed back on the claim that governors have enough tests, and called it “absolutely false.”
While a recent study found that the U.S. was conducting an average of 150,000 tests per day, many experts have said there should be around three to four million tests being done per day.
Health experts note that testing is crucial for states to reopen their economies because it allows officials to isolate individuals infected with the coronavirus and those who have come in contact with them.