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Government officials sought to assure critical Democratic lawmakers that COVID-19 testing capacity will increase as questions persist about how reopening state economies will work without a vaccine or widespread treatment options.
“The time for magical thinking is over,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said during a remote hearing on Tuesday morning for the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. “President Trump must acknowledge that the federal response has been insufficient, and that more people are dying.”
More than 1.3 Americans have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least 80,000 people have died, according to the most recent data from Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told senators during the hearing that he expects the number of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. is likely higher than the official tally, based on reports of deaths at home
Fauci, along with three other key voices in the Trump administration response to the pandemic, including Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner Dr. Stephen Hahn, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Robert Redfield, and Dr. Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of health for the Department of Health and Human Services, testified during the hearing.
The administration expects to boost testing capacity — long a pain point in the U.S. response to the COVID-19 pandemic — with plans to conduct between 40 million and 50 million COVID-19 diagnostic tests a month by September, according to remarks made by Giroir. This includes 20 million to 30 million point-of-care tests.
That is a “significant increase” from the nine million tests in total that have been performed in the U.S. since the novel coronavirus was first detected here in January, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said in response to Giroir’s comments.
In the nearly four months since the first COVID-19 case was identified in the U.S., the outbreaks have shut down local and state economies, putting many millions of Americans out of work and straining local health systems that quickly ran out of ventilators, intensive care unit beds and personal protective equipment for their workers.
And while the FDA recently granted an emergency use authorization to Gilead Sciences Inc.’s GILD, -3.52% remdesivir as a COVID-19 treatment, it is only authorized to be used as a treatment for severely ill, hospitalized patients. Fauci testified that while the drug is efficacious, the benefit to patients is “modest.”
The hearing was held remotely in part, with Fauci, Hahn, Redfield, Giroir and a number of senators dialing in with videoconferencing tools from their homes.
