Trump, Retailers to Announce Expanded Coronavirus Testing

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump and retailers are expected to announce wider availability of coronavirus tests as his administration seeks to address concerns from states and business leaders that U.S. testing must be more robust for Americans to feel comfortable returning to work.

The president is scheduled to make the announcement this afternoon in a meeting with retail executives, according to two people familiar with the matter. They asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public.

In pushing to start reopening the country, the White House has fielded broad concerns from business leaders and states that the U.S. doesn’t have sufficient testing to relent on social-distancing practices that have crippled the economy.

Trump praised executives from Walmart Inc., Target Corp., CVS Health Corp. and Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. in a Rose Garden news conference on March 13, saying they had agreed to set up testing facilities in their parking lots. But only a handful of locations opened within the first month of Trump’s announcement, leading to criticism of the president for over-promising on the initiative.

So far, about 70 testing sites have opened at drugstores including Rite Aid, CVS and Walgreens, as well as Walmart. Most diagnostic testing is still done at hospitals or by other health-care providers. The result is that testing has been focused mostly on very sick people, resulting in what experts believe is a serious undercount of cases.

Experts estimate the U.S. will have to run at least 500,000 tests daily to start to get people back to work. That’s about 200,000 a day more than the peak number of daily tests conduced within the last week, according to the Covid Tracking Project, a data group following test counts.

At Monday’s event, it isn’t clear whether the president will address shortages of materials needed to expand testing, including swabs to collect samples and chemical media to transport them to labs.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is also expected to release new guidelines widening testing criteria to people without symptoms, but who work in high-risk settings, the Associated Press reported. Research shows that people without symptoms or who have yet to develop them may be able to spread the disease.

The new coronavirus has sickened more than 968,000 Americans and killed nearly 55,000 as of Monday. The U.S. has performed more than 5.4 million coronavirus tests so far, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

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