Trump’s statements are absurd and dangerous. None of his science advisers support sending people back without the ability to test on a wide, national basis. Governors and mayors agree. At his Thursday press briefing, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), who is working in concert with Connecticut and New Jersey governors, explained: “Rapid testing and testing is going to be the bridge to the new economy and getting to work and restarting. We’re not going to go to go from red to green. We’re going to go from red to yellow.” He added: “Yellow is let the people who can go back to work start going back to work. How do you know who can go back to work? Test them. You have rapid testing capacity. We have to bring it to scale. We have to bring it to scale quickly, and that’s something that the state is working on as well as the federal government.”

Former head of the Food and Drug Administration Scott Gottlieb was emphatic about the need for widespread testing on Thursday, tweeting: “Even when we’re likely to seek to reopen parts of America in May and June, there will be baseline spread. The epidemic won’t simply collapse. Against that backdrop, we need much more test capacity to safely make transition to normal life." In a report released on March 29, Gottlieb recommended that “a national capacity of at least 750,000 tests per week would be sufficient to move to case-based interventions when paired with sufficient capacity in supportive public-health infrastructure (e.g., contact tracing).” We would also need to “invest in new tools to make it efficient for providers to communicate test results and make data easily accessible to public-health officials working to contain future outbreaks.”

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Even in countries that have brought down the number of new coronavirus cases to near-zero, a second wave of cases reappeared when stay-at-home restrictions were lifted. The Los Angeles Times reports, “New cases of the disease have emerged in Wuhan, Singapore and Hong Kong in the past week, after governments lifted some of their social distancing controls.” The report continues: “Restrictions on group gatherings, business activity and travel are only effective at reducing the spread of the disease. Evidence is surfacing that new outbreaks can occur once those measures are lifted.”

To recap: Trump’s gross negligence in failing to respond to warnings about the virus left us with no alternative but social distancing, which helped lower the death toll but still could not prevent tens of thousands of deaths. Trump now wants to lift the measures we were forced to adopt — without a viable program for testing, contract tracing and quarantine. If the country pays attention to him, thousands more will die. Trump is either incapable of understanding the risk or is unbothered by the prospect of these unnecessary deaths.

In contrast to Trump, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) understands the science. In a CNBC interview with Jim Cramer on Thursday, she had this exchange:

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Jim Cramer. When can we re-open America for business without putting them in jeopardy for their health? Speaker Pelosi. Well, testing, testing, testing, three-word answer. What we really have to do is take inventory of actually what the challenge is. We’re flying blind without that and we’re long overdue. . . . . I’ll tell you what. Let’s make it let’s do something original in Washington. Let’s have it be science-based. Let’s have it be science-based, based on testing so we know what the challenge is, that we have an idea of — we don’t know, even though they say they do, but scientists tell me we do not know that if you have contracted this virus and you recover from it, whether you are immune to it in the future. We just don’t have those facts. So if somebody has had it, is that person immune? Is that a person we can use as a resource for prevention of others? Or is that a person who is contagious, again, infectious?

Pelosi understands that “we all want to be able to go to work, we want everyone to go to work and we want those who are working to be less at risk of their lives as they try to save other lives.” But unlike Trump, she comprehends that only when we have a health solution in place can we move away from social distancing and reopen the economy.

Trump apparently is so frantic to restart the economy, which threatens to rack up unemployment numbers on a par with the Great Depression, that he doesn’t seem to realize that many Americans will not return to work unless they know it is safe. The ignorant, the desperate and the right-wing media junkies might be the ones to pay the price if they heed his advice and venture out absent widespread testing, contact tracing and isolation procedures.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden needs to be as forceful as possible on this point. He should be blunt: Relying on Trump allowed thousands of Americans to die. Trusting him again would result in thousands more deaths. This is unquestionably true. Biden cannot shrink from direct indictments of Trump’s reckless conduct. Doing so would give Trump an escape hatch and reopen a path to his reelection.

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