Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down, please.
President Donald Trump
Rally in Tulsa, OK - June 20, 2020
It would appear that this is exactly what President Trump wants because the CDC has now abruptly changed its guidelines with respect to testing. The CDC now states that asymptomatic people should not get tested even if they know they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19.
Such an edict can only serve one purpose - to artificially keep the number of COVID-19 cases down and give the impression that it is in the rear view mirror. Mind you, the U.S. has just topped 5.8 million cases. That's plenty of American carnage. But doing less testing won't stop the spread of community infection. It will just keep it hidden until it is too late.
The Trump Administration directing the CDC to change its testing guidelines undermines contact tracing which seeks to inform members of the public if they have been exposed to COVID-19 and strongly encourages those individuals who have been exposed to get tested.
While New York Governor Andrew Cuomo won't follow the revised guidelines I suspect that Trump's gubernatorial allies like Florida's Ron DeSantis, Georgia's Brian Kemp, Greg Abbott of Texas and Doug Ducey of Arizona probably will. In which case, we should heed the words of Dr. Alison Galvani, Director for the Center for Infectious Disease Modeling and Analysis at Yale School of Medicine who tweeted, “This change in policy will kill.”
All of which renders Melania Trump's attempt at empathy last night meaningless.
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