A coronavirus testing site in the Bronx, New York, last week.Credit…Brittainy Newman/The New York Times
The Trump administration’s new testing strategy, released Sunday to Congress, holds individual states responsible for planning and carrying out all coronavirus testing.
The Department of Health and Human Services released the proposal to meet requirements in the Paycheck Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act, signed into law by President Trump on April 24, that some federal agencies come up with a strategic testing plan within 30 days.
The federal government’s role is to “enable innovation, help scale supplies and provide strategic guidance,” according to the report, but states, territories and tribes are ultimately responsible for setting and meeting testing goals, with some help from private companies.
The United States is conducting about 300,000 tests per day, and the proposal says this number should be sufficient if testing can be targeted to “likely-positive individuals.” An analysis by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University estimated the actual need at more than 3 million tests per day and 5 million per day by June. This estimate is based on the idea of testing everyone infected, and also tracing and testing all of their contacts, with a test that would miss 20 percent of cases.
The proposal also leaves it to states to plan for contact tracing and isolation, rapidly identify new clusters of Covid-19 and adopt new technologies. It says the federal government is “supporting and encouraging” states to rely heavily on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
