Leana S. Wen is an emergency physician and visiting professor at George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. Previously, she served as Baltimore’s health commissioner.
Over the past week, members of the Trump administration have issued justifications for why the United States does not need mass covid-19 testing. Here’s what they get wrong:
We don’t need mass testing to reopen the country. Actually, we do. Reopening depends on our ability to transition from population-wide mitigation — which is what social distancing does — to individual-level containment. That means we must identify each individual with covid-19 and then trace and quarantine their contacts. This requires mass testing. In addition, one of the White House’s guidelines for reopening the country is a downward trend in infections. We can’t know that the numbers are going down unless we have an accurate daily count, which can only be obtained through widespread testing…
It’s not just testing that we need to reopen society. It’s true that there are other key components, such as the public health infrastructure to conduct contact tracing and social supports to isolate those are affected. But testing is the linchpin. We must know who is testing positive before we can identify their contacts and quarantine them. Just because other components must also be present doesn’t change the necessity of testing.
Read the full piece in The Washington Post here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/22/7-things-administration-is-getting-wrong-about-testing/