NEW YORK — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D – California) complained yesterday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that President Donald J. Trump has responded to COVID-19 with “delay, denial, death.”
Pelosi has enough nerve to hogtie the average neurologist.
First, on March 22, she triggered a five-day delay in enacting the $2.2 trillion CARES Act virus-recovery legislation.
Next, on April 9, she bullied Senate Democrat leader Chuck Schumer and his minions into stalling the $484 billion “Phase 3.5” COVID-19 relief bill. This needlessly has added yet another 14 days of pain to an already tortured American public.
So far, Pelosi has gummed up the works for 19 days, total, so Democrats could demand irrelevant trinkets such as a federal ban on voter ID cards, arts and humanities funds, racial and gender set-asides in lending, and much more. Americans surely have lost their jobs, businesses, hopes, and lives while Pelosi dragged her well-heeled feet. For her to accuse Trump of delay is like a slug calling a greyhound slow.
“Testing. Testing. Testing,” Pelosi told Chris Wallace on April 19’s Fox News Sunday, in yet another tirade. “The president gets an F — a failure on testing.”
Trump haters like Pelosi hammer the president for not commencing widespread COVID-19 evaluations the moment this pathogen roared out of Wuhan, China. These complaints assume that Trump had a beautiful, very special pile of test kits sitting around, itching for distribution. Trump, more hateful than ever, hid those supplies, just to watch Americans die.
This Left-wing fantasy springs from a child-like belief in instant results, magic, and ESP. With high-resolution hindsight, Trump’s enemies expect him to have predicted the COVID-19 outbreak last fall, designed an effective screening for it, and then order enough kits so that when the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on January 30, he could have unlocked a vault, loaded those shiny kits onto jets, and delivered them across America — at nearly the speed of sound.
What an incredible country Trump’s foes envision. If anyone visits, please send a postcard.
To the Left, Trump is a deeply bigoted, salivating idiot whose ties fill with drool every time he drags his knuckles through the West Wing. Simultaneously, he is a genius who can generate sophisticated scientific products by the millions through sheer omniscience and omnipotence.
Which is it?
China did not release COVID-19’s initial genetic data until January 11. Chinese scientists published further such details on February 25 and March 4. As Trump’s foes have screamed for tests, the focus of such assays has been a moving target.
Trump’s Centers for Disease Control shipped initial COVID-19 tests to 100 laboratories on February 5, just five days after the president restricted travel from China, six days after WHO’s pandemic declaration, and 25 days after China shared the disease’s DNA profile — a blink of an eye in microbiology.
Alas, CDC’s examinations proved overly inaccurate. Other, reliable trials had to be developed from scratch. So, Trump recruited Abbott Labs, LabCorp, Roche, Quest, Thermo Fisher, and other private companies to engineer new tests. The Food and Drug Administration approved these innovations in record time.
The small number of kits first produced limited them mainly to people who exhibited reasonable suspicion of having COVID-19: those with fever, coughs, respiratory difficulty, etc. Unfortunately, quantities were insufficient for anyone and everyone.
[SOURCE: Business Insider]
As production increased, however, President Trump encouraged Costco, Walmart, and other retailers to begin drive-through tests in their parking lots. Since mid-March, this public-private partnership has helped screen 3,893,815 Americans as of April 20, Business Insider calculates. This is the highest number of scans administered by any nation — more than Italy (1,305,833), South Korea (563,035, the United Kingdom (501,379), Turkey (634,277), and Japan (16,275) combined.
In per-capita terms, Italy leads with 20,926 tests per million people. The U.S. is second (11,821). South Korea is third (10,862). The UK (7,624), Turkey (7,537), and Japan (930) follow.
America’s 3.9 million screenings are a modest start, relative to population: 1.2 percent down, 98.8 percent to go.
For better or worse, America is not Panama. One-third of a billion people live here, not 4.2 million. These tests will take a while.
America simply lacks the capacity to investigate 330 million people, anytime soon. It would be a thrill to test every American in the next few weeks. Good luck with that!
So far, Abbott Labs has created the fastest COVID-19 review. It gives positive results in five minutes, while negatives take 13 to 15 minutes. This is loads better than earlier probes, which required several hours, or overnight waits, before yielding answers. To its enormous credit, Abbott Labs created this assessment out of thin air; FDA authorized it in about six weeks, not the usual nine to 12 months. For this spectacular development, thank President Trump’s public-private partnerships and his instructions to the FDA to get the lead out.
According to news accounts, Abbott is producing 50,000 kits daily. That’s 1.5 million per month. Amazing!
They are raising this by 33 percent to 2 million kits monthly in June. At that rate, 330 million units would require 115 months. (This assumes enough medical personnel to administer and process these experiments). That’s 9.6 years to check every American. This would re-open the U.S. just in time for Christmas 2029.
If trying just 10 percent of Americans would do the trick, those 33 million kits would take Abbott Labs 11.5 months to manufacture. That would let America re-open on April Fool’s Day 2021.
Imagine that Lilly, Merck, Novartis, and Pfizer extended their production lines, and yielded 20 million units per month. That’s 10 times Abbott’s June output.
This could test every American in 16.5 months. Starting now, America could re-open in mid-August 2021.
If the economy is hideous now, just padlock it until almost two Labor Days hence.
If all of these companies cooperated immediately, they could produce 33 million kits in seven weeks. This could proof one tenth of Americans and then open the country in mid-June 2020. Again this assumes that 90 percent of Americans would walk around totally unaware of whether they were COVID-19 positive and now enjoy immunity, or remain vulnerable to infection and intubation within a fortnight.
Universal tests, or at least the “widespread” ones for which Pelosi screams, are impossible — for now. Shifting production from other drugs to COVID-19 kits would help, but it would take a 10-fold boost above Abbott Labs’ valiant efforts. Again, this assumes that other manufacturers with sterile, pharmaceutical-grade equipment leaped into the fray, or were mandated to do so by President Trump, by invoking the Defense Production Act.
Funny: the Left calls Trump a fascist dictator and then whines when he merely invites companies to help him crush COVID-19, rather than order them to obey his commands. Once again: Which is it?
Antibody analysis also is encouraging, although this requires a drop of each subject’s blood, via pinprick. This discomfort aside, Cellex’s serological test reportedly offers results in 15 minutes. According to GoodRx, Abbott plans to ship 20 million late-stage antibody kits by June 30. Even that huge number — coupled with copycat manufacturing by other companies and the simultaneous production of Abbott’s aforementioned five-minute exam — suggests such a Manhattan Project still would not deliver 330 million kits until about January 1, 2021, or enough for 33 million until roughly July 1, 2020.
The only apparent path out of this Hell, other than months or years of additional quarantine and economic implosion, is to use highly limited evaluations, not the Tests for All approach on which Pelosi and her comrades insist. Laser-gun-style thermometers can pick the febrile out of crowds and send them home. For now, this might be the best bet while the test-kit assembly lines steam ahead.
A happy ending? No. This is neither more nor less than the hard, cold, sad math behind testing, testing, testing.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research.
