The United States will need to produce hundreds of millions of coronavirus tests in order to give parents and students the confidence they need to return to school in the fall, Sen. Lamar Alexander said in an interview on Friday.

As chairman for the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Republican lawmaker said he is spending his days and nights at home in Tennessee “trying to encourage a Manhattan Project for testing” so that every American later this year will have access to a test.


The effort is critical to allowing some semblance of normalcy this fall by letting kids go back to school in time for the fall semester. And that’s going to be a difficult task, Alexander said, unless the government, Congress and the private sector do everything they can to increase test production in the next month.