Fact-checking President Trump’s marathon news conference
At a marathon news conference on March 31, President Trump acknowledged the death toll in the United States from the coronavirus outbreak could be staggering, with best-case scenario estimates ranging from 100,000 to 200,000. The message marked a sharp break from his many weeks of dismissing the seriousness of the outbreak in the United States. Still, even if his tone was more sober, the president continued to play fast and loose with the facts. Here’s a sampling from the nearly 13,000 words spoken by the President.
The testing snafu
“We inherited obsolete tests.”
There were no tests for the novel coronavirus, which only emerged in China late in 2019, so tests had to be developed specifically by countries starting in January. Trump appears to be referring to a system in place that relied on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to take the lead in developing the tests. But a still-unspecified manufacturing problem caused the CDC to distribute flawed tests to state and local health departments. On top of that, having the CDC take the lead, rather than the private sector, was inappropriate for the task of testing potentially hundreds of thousands of people.
Two former Trump administration officials had warned on Jan. 28, in a Wall Street Journal article, that the CDC was not up to task and the private sector needed to be engaged. But the Trump administration waited another month before it fast-tracked the development of tests by private companies.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...ws-conference/
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