Trump administration officials appeared to disagree on how prepared the country was to get back to some kind of normalcy on Wednesday morning.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, a member of the vice president’s coronavirus task force, warned CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday that a second wave of coronavirus cases was “inevitable” if the nation opened up before it was fully prepared.
“If by that time we have put into place all of the countermeasures that you need to address this, we should do reasonably well,” the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director said, according to CNN.
“If we don’t do that successfully, we could be in for a bad fall and a bad winter,” Fauci said.
Fauci, the self-described “skeptic” of the task force, told CNN that he believes governors — Republicans and Democrats — who say they still need more testing and protective equipment.
“We have to help them,” the physician added, speaking of the federal government. Fauci said the administration needed to partner with states to ensure they were appropriately supplied to continue dealing with the pandemic.
The World Health Organization says the ability to identify new cases is measured in the percentage of tests that yield positive results, which should be below 10%, as reported by National Public Radio. Numerous states are still reporting above 20% positives, according to Axios.
Senior Trump adviser Jared Kushner called the pandemic a “historic challenge,” on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” Wednesday. COVID-19 has killed nearly 59,000 people in the United States, according to Johns Hopkins.
Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, said there has never been a similar instance when the nation needed to “respond in this quick time frame to such a massive surge in demand for supplies that we didn’t make in this country.” He called the administration’s response “quite successful,” attributing that to “public-private partnerships.”
In regards to testing, Kushner said the administration was again reaching out to governors and had fulfilled all their orders for testing supplies. “They have excess capacity in their states,” he said.
“I’m very confident that we have all the testing we need to start opening the country,” Kushner said. He said that confidence was based on safety guidelines set by the coronavirus task force on April 19.
The Mayo Clinic believes that a COVID-19 vaccine “is perhaps the best hope for ending the pandemic.” A successful coronavirus vaccine has not yet been tested.
More than a million people in the U.S. have tested positive for the novel coronavirus, according to the Johns Hopkins tally.