Did Trump Really Just Call COVID-19 Testing Overrated?

With so many states across America already beginning to reopen, safety measures like COVID-19 testing are as important as ever, which is the general consensus of most experts — except, apparently, the president. In a speech on Thursday at Owens and Minor, a medical supply distributor in Allentown, Pennsylvania, President Donald Trump asked whether testing for COVID-19, is actually “overrated."

“When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases. They don't want to write that, but it's common sense,” Trump said in his address.

The president also mentioned that "Jared Kushner had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn’t do it." Kushner, the president's advisor, has become infamous for advising the president and the administration not to take coronavirus seriously earlier this year, alleging that initial reports from China were inflated and blown out of proportion.

In response to his comment on testing, the president has received backlash for this statement, which comes after a series of critiques to his recent coronavirus allegations. President Trump has consistently downplayed the pandemic and the toll it's taking on public health, despite the entire West Wing being exposed to the virus because the administration has not taken it seriously. Other statements of his in the past have been directly in opposition with what experts have continued to say, including companies that have had to ask that people not inject their products to "cure" COVID-19.

In the latest iteration of "What Did Trump Just Say?", public health officials have continued to remind the public that it's actually more testing America needs, not less, to be able to better figure out factors like how the disease is spreading and how it works. Journalists and experts have already begun to weigh in on Twitter and in the public sphere, in shock at the president's continued statements.

As of now, according to the most recent statistics, more than 85,000 people in America have already died from COVID-19 in recent months, which is more deaths than anywhere else in the world so far — and much higher than the next highest death rate in the United Kingdom where 33,693 COVID-19 related deaths have been reported.

Earlier this week, on 12th May, Dr Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stated once again that while the coronavirus will not simply disappear, the threat of a possible second wave could still be mitigated by aggressive testing efforts and health care preparedness.