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U.S. Urges Restraint in Virus Testing to Preserve Masks, Gear

Trump Insists Coronavirus Testing ‘Going Very Well’

(Bloomberg) --

The Trump administration is urging Americans to go without the coronavirus test if they can, as the U.S. looks to ration scarce medical equipment for treating the rising number of infected people.

At a White House briefing Saturday, Vice President Mike Pence and other officials said only people with coronavirus symptoms should seek the test. Of those, priority groups include health-care workers and people in hospitals or long-term care homes. Labs are also working on a self-administered test that would lower the need for protective gear, but it’s not yet ready.

“Not every single person in the United States needs to get tested,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the National Institutes of Health. “When you go in to get tested, you are consuming personal protecting equipment -- masks and gowns. Those are high-priority for the health-care workers.”

Saturday’s briefing followed a pattern of previous ones, with President Donald Trump making optimistic predictions about how quickly supplies will be available. Fauci said they hoped to address the worst shortfalls within days.

“The testing’s going very well,” Trump said, even as his staff urged restraint in seeking the diagnostic. “We’re going to be celebrating a great victory in the not-so-distant future.”

Trump brushed off questions about whether his administration brushed off intelligence reports from January and February warning of the coming Covid-19 pandemic. The president also repeated his promotion of a controversial malaria drug as a potential cure for coronavirus, saying he thought ill patients have nothing to lose by trying it.

Earlier, the president said on Twitter that the combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, taken together, could be “game changers,” expanding on comments made at Thursday’s briefing.

Fauci, however, cautioned that it’s too early to tell if it works, and that some countries have seen people poisoned by using the drug in an attempt to ward off the virus.

“The president is talking about hope for people and it’s not an unreasonable thing to hope for people,” Fauci said.

“I’m not totally sure what the president was referring to,” Fauci said when asked about Trump’s tweets.

Pence joined Fauci and Brett Giroir, assistant secretary for health, in urging people not to get tested unless necessary.

“If you don’t have symptoms, don’t do a test,” Pence said. “It is another way that the American people can make sure that we are preserving the resources our health care workers need.”

Trump has refused to take responsibility for the nation’s shortage of coronavirus tests, a problem that persists despite repeated promises from top U.S. officials -- particularly Pence -- that it would be quickly alleviated. “Testing is going well, it’s ramping up but we should still have priorities,” Giroir said.

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The administration has been slow to detail what supplies it has available, even as it turns to wartime powers to order production if needed.

Trump said Saturday he hasn’t yet needed to invoke that power, in part because companies are stepping up to manufacture needed supplies. Apparel maker Hanesbrands Inc. is retrofitting facilities to begin producing masks, he said, while Apple Inc. was donating two million that it had on hand. Some distillers are also ramping up industrial alcohol production for hand sanitizers in response to rising demand.

The list of potential shortages is lengthy. It includes masks -- Trump complained Saturday that health workers were throwing away too many masks, as is standard practice, rather than sanitizing and reusing some of them. His health officials acknowledged that hospitals are facing shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE, for health-care workers.

Pence called on companies to scavenge for masks they might already have. “If you’ve got 100 of them, if you’ve got 10,000 of them, load them up and drive them over to your local hospital,” Pence said. Shortages also include gloves and gowns.

Drive-Through Testing

“We do have disparities in availabilities of PPEs now and we’re working hard to correct that,” Fauci said. “It’s a serious issue.” Giroir separately added: “We need to preserve our PPE to the degree that we can.”

Ventilators, machines that help patients breath, are also in short supply. Pence said Saturday that the national stockpile includes over 13,000 ventilators -- New York state alone has said it needs twice that number -- but that there are another 100,000 in other health facilities that could be retrofitted. He said the administration would say more about supplies on Monday.

Testing kits, too, are needed. New Jersey’s first drive-through test site was closed on Friday as demand surged. Giroir gave the most detailed snapshot of testing so far.

He said 195,000 people -- including over 50,000 on Friday -- have been tested so far at federal and state public health labs, as well as major reference laboratories. That number doesn’t include tests done at roughly 15,000 hospital-based labs, data from which will be reported this week, he said. It also doesn’t include tests that aren’t yet complete.

Cases Surge

That leaves the U.S. without a full snapshot of how many people have been tested so far. More than 19,000 had been diagnosed as having the virus, Pence said. In a separate tally, Johns Hopkins University said more than 24,000 cases have been diagnosed as of Saturday, behind only China, Italy and Spain.

As far as availability of tests, Giroir said that there were more than 10 million coronavirus tests put into the “commercial market” as of a week ago, and that there will be about 27 million by next week.

Separately, a Covid-19 test made by Cepheid, a unit of Danaher Corp., can deliver results in less than an hour and has been approved under an FDA emergency authorization. It’s the first test that clinicians can use at the bedside.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.