Trump assured reporters “we’re going to be there very soon.” He said he didn’t have the exact data off the top of his head, but “if you look at the numbers, it could be that we’re getting very close.”
Trump has set more modest testing goals in the recent past. A week earlier, he and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo agreed to work toward testing 40,000 people each day across the state – roughly double the current rate. “It’s a very aggressive goal,” Cuomo said at the time.
New York, the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. and the nation’s fourth-most populated state, has done far more testing than any other. If every state in the country conducted 40,000 tests daily, that would total 2 million tests per day – far below the 5 million that Trump said he will exceed in the “very near future.”
State officials including Cuomo have previously lamented shortages of supplies necessary to ramp up testing, including the test kits themselves, swabs and reagents, which are chemicals needed to analyze tests. Due to scarcity, cities such as New York City still have to prioritize testing for first responders and patients in the hospital, Mayor Bill de Blasio said last week. Limited testing means health officials can’t monitor the spread of the virus throughout the general population.
Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/trump-says-us-will-be-able-to-run-5-million-coronavirus-tests-per-day-very-soon-despite-shortages-across-states.html
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