WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is falsely casting blame on governors and the Obama administration for shortages in coronavirus testing and declaring victory over what he calls relatively low death rates in the United States. That's too soon to tell.
Here is a look at his claims over the weekend, also covering the economy:
Testing
TRUMP, on governors urging wider availability of virus tests: "They don't want to use all of the capacity that we've created. We have tremendous capacity. ...They know that. The governors know that. The Democrat governors know that; they're the ones that are complaining." — news briefing Saturday
THE FACTS: Trump's assertion that governors are not using available testing capacity is contradicted by one of his top health advisers. He's also wrong that Democrats are the only ones expressing concerns about the adequacy of Covid-19 testing; several Republican governors cite the problems. Maryland’s Republican Governor Larry Hogan called Trump’s claim “absolutely false.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the federal government's top infectious disease expert, told The Associated Press that the United States does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to begin reopening the nation's economy.
"We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we're not there yet," Fauci, a member of the White House's coronavirus task force, said Tuesday.
Among Fauci's top concerns: that there will be new outbreaks in locations where social distancing has eased, but public health officials don't have the capabilities to test for the virus, isolate any new cases and track down everyone that an infected person came into contact with.
His concerns are echoed by several Republicans.
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, on Friday said his state's testing capacity was inadequate and urged a larger role for the federal government.
He said states have been competing with each other to try to get more testing supplies, a process he described as "a slog."
"It's a perilous set of circumstances trying to figure out how to make this work, and until we've got the testing up to speed — which has got to be part of the federal government stepping in and helping — we're just not going to be there."
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, plans to keep applying pressure on the Food and Drug Administration to address the rationing of a key component that is necessary to produce tests. He said full testing capacity can't be reached unless it is more widely distributed.
Republican Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan on Sunday called the lack of virus testing "probably the number one problem in America, and has been from the beginning of this crisis."
"And I can tell you, I talk to governors on both sides of the aisle nearly every single day," he said on CNN's "State of the Union." "The administration, I think, is trying to ramp up testing, and trying — they are doing some things with respect to private labs. But to try to push this off to say that the governors have plenty of testing, and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren't doing our job, is just absolutely false. "
TRUMP: "Some partisan voices are attempting to politicize the issue of testing, which they shouldn't be doing, because I inherited broken junk." — news briefing Saturday
TRUMP: "We inherited a broken, terrible system." — news briefing Saturday
THE FACTS: His repeated insistence that the Obama administration is to blame for initial delays in testing is obviously false. The novel coronavirus did not exist until late last year, so there was no test to inherit.