Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, also struggled to articulate the lack of any federal plan this week.
For the past few months, Rivers has helped write a series of reports for the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, about how to reopen the economy amid the pandemic. But testifying to Congress on Wednesday, she emphasized how little those plans had been followed and how much work remained to be done. The U.S. needs a federal team relentlessly focused on assessing and expanding its ability to test for the coronavirus, she said. Such a task force could tell governors, for instance, “whether and when significantly more tests may be reliably available to states,” and it could advise businesses on whether their plans to test workers “are even possible.”
But that federal effort has yet to materialize, she said: “If this work has been done, I have not seen it, and I fear that neither have the governors and other state and local leaders who are having to make decisions about how and when to reopen.”
In recent days, President Trump has seemed skeptical of the utility of tests, even though White House employees are tested for the virus every day. After Katie Miller, a member of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff, tested positive for the virus today, Trump said that the result illustrated why “the whole concept of tests aren’t necessarily great.”
