ugc_banner

US states struggling to cope up with testing guidelines issued by Trump

WION Web Team
Washington, United StatesUpdated: Apr 29, 2020, 06:27 PM IST
main img
Photograph:(AFP)

Story highlights

US states claim that Trump’s announcement continues to send mixed messaging around testing targets, with most of the burden falling on them.

US states are struggling to keep up with the guidelines issued by the White House to under to ramp up Covid-19 testing.

They claim that Trump’s announcement continues to send mixed messaging around testing targets, with most of the burden falling on them.

According to Ashish K Jha, the faculty director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, ''they know that the federal response has been a disaster, and so now their strategy is blame 50 states.''

He said that the White House officials acknowledge that the coronavirus testing cannot be accelerated ''unless the federal government takes direct responsibility''. But they refuse to take ''accountability''.

Following early setbacks, the United States has scrambled to scale up diagnostic testing as part of a strategy to safely reopen the country.

However, experts have warned that current testing levels are still far from where they need to be.

Dr Anthony Fauci, an infectious disease expert and key member of the White House’s coronavirus taskforce, said ''we need to double the testing in the next several weeks.

The number of coronavirus cases in the United States crossed 1 million on Tuesday, according to the Centre for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University.