The White House will announce this afternoon a push for states to test at least 2 percent of their populations for the coronavirus in May, a senior administration official told reporters today.
To help states meet that goal, the federal government is providing them with 12.9 million swabs and nearly 10 million tubes of chemicals used to transport samples.
The White House will also reveal how it plans to distribute $11 billion from the CARES Act to support state coronavirus testing plans. The money will be distributed to states based on a formula that considers the prevalence of the coronavirus in states and their overall population.
The U.S. ran approximately 1.9 million coronavirus tests last week, according to the senior administration official, and has conducted approximately 9 million tests since January.
That is well below the level of testing that public health experts say is necessary to safely reopen the country — even as several states have begun easing social distancing measures.
“Estimates for the number of tests we need range from 3.5 million to tens of millions per week,” Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, testified to Congress last week.
States are being asked to provide updates on their testing strategies and report specific statistics to the federal government within a few weeks, a second White House official told reporters.
