A Month After Emergency Declaration, Trump's Promises Largely Unfulfilled https://www.npr.org/2020/04/13/832797592/a-month-after-emergency-declaration-trumps-promises-largely-unfulfilled?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social Wow the bylines on this via @NPR

One month ago today, President Trump declared a national emergency.

In a Rose Garden address, flanked by leaders from giant retailers and medical testing companies, he promised a mobilization of public and private resources to attack the coronavirus.

"We've been working very hard on this. We've made tremendous progress," Trump said. "When you compare what we've done to other areas of the world, it's pretty incredible."

But few of those promises have come to pass.

NPR's Investigations Team dug into each of the claims made from the podium that day. And rather than a sweeping national campaign of screening, drive-through sample collection and lab testing, it found a smattering of small pilot projects and aborted efforts.

In some cases, no action was taken at all.

Target did not formally partner with the federal government, for example.

And a lauded Google project turned out to not to be led by Google at all, and then once launched was limited to a smattering of counties in California.

So about that drive-through testing promise:

During the Rose Garden address, Trump introduced a series of leaders from major retailers to suggest there would be cooperation between the federal government and private sector companies for drive-through testing.

NPR contacted the retailers who were there and found that discussions have not led to any wide-scale implementation of drive-through tests.

In the month since the announcement, Walmart has opened two testing sites — one in the Chicago area and another in Bentonville, Ark. Walgreens has opened two in Chicago; CVS has opened four sites.

Target has not opened any. In fact, the company said it had no formal partnership with the federal government, and suggested they were waiting for the government to take the lead.

(that's a long, long, long and futile wait with this administration)

Home Testing Promised, But Not Implemented

The president also welcomed Bruce Greenstein, an executive vice president of the LHC Group, to the microphone.

Greenstein's organization primarily provides in-home health care, and he pledged that it would be helping with testing "for Americans that can't get to a test site or live in rural areas far away from a retail establishment."

NPR called more than 20 LHC sites in 12 states, and none of them are doing in-home testing one month following the Rose Garden address. Employees at the LHC sites said they lacked both testing kits and the training to administer kits.

During the March 13 Rose Garden address, the president also promised that Google was working to develop a website to determine whether a COVID-19 test would be warranted, and if so, to direct individuals to nearby testing.

The president said there were 1,700 Google engineers working on it, and the vice president said that guidance on the website would be available in two days.

Two days. March 15th. Trump promised the greatest coronavirus testing website.

"Google is helping to develop a website," the president said. "It's going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location."

No such screening and testing website was ever developed by Google.

A pilot program was developed by Verily, a sister company to Google owned by the same parent company: Alphabet. BUT . . .

Verily's program, called Project Baseline, was created to support California community-based COVID-19 testing from screening to testing to delivery of test results.

Verily has rolled out six testing sites primarily in coordination with the California state government — not the federal government — and is currently only available to residents of five counties in California.

(tremendous. the biggest. beautiful. like nobody's ever seen, etc)

A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson pointed out that Apple had released a screening tool in collaboration with the CDC and the White House. That screening tool does not have the functions outlined in the March 13 Rose Garden address.

Trump also said he would waive license requirements so that doctors could practice in states with the greatest needs, for example. But medical licensing is a state issue, and the president does not have the authority to waive it.

Trump also announced that his administration would "purchase, at a very good price, large quantities of crude oil for storage in the U.S. Strategic Reserve."

"We're going to fill it right up to the top," he said, "saving the American taxpayer billions and billions of dollars."

The Trump administration has not done so. The president made the promise without first securing the funds from Congress, and the Department of Energy puts the responsibility on Congress' shoulders.

In the days before the March 13 Rose Garden address, leaders of diagnostic testing labs like LabCorp and Quest went to the White House with three core requests. During the Rose Garden address, the coronavirus task force pledged to wield government resources for their partnership.

More than a month later, the diagnostic testing labs still have those three requests: government funds to build new testing facilities, national standards to prioritize who gets tested, and government support for the supply chain.

Private companies did part of what was promised in the Rose Garden address — there is more testing today than a month ago. But those tests were not the primary reason for inadequate testing.

The United States lags behind in sample collection kits — the swabs and tubes that frontline medical workers send to labs. And those labs themselves struggled with processing capacity.