President Donald Trump sought to downplay the numbers associated with COVID-19 in the United States — which have passed 2 million confirmed cases and are nearing 120,000 lives lost — by arguing that the soaring national count was simply the result of superior testing.
“If you don’t test, you don’t have any cases,” Trump said at a June 15 roundtable discussion at the White House. “If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.”
It’s a talking point the administration is emphasizing. Vice President Mike Pence reiterated it during a phone call to Republican governors that evening, recommending they use the argument as a strategy to quiet public concern about surging case tallies in some states. It’s also a variation on a tweet the president sent earlier in the day.
With that in mind, we wanted to dig deeper. We reached out to the White House for comment or clarification, but we never heard back. Independent researchers told us, though, that the president’s remarks are not only misleading — they’re also counterproductive in terms of thinking through what’s needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
THE BIG PICTURE
Essentially, the president is arguing that the United States is finding more cases of COVID-19 because we are testing more — and that our increased testing makes it appear the pandemic is worse in the U.S. than in other countries.
“We will show more — more cases when other countries have far more cases than we do; they just don’t talk about it,” he added.
But that isn’t true.
The numbers paint a stark picture. The United States has recorded 2.1 million cases of the novel virus so far, about a quarter of the global total and more than any other country. To Trump’s point, the country is testing more now than it did at the start of the outbreak _ per capita, the U.S. is in the top 20% of countries when it comes to cumulative tests run.
This beefed-up testing still likely reflects an undercount in cases, though. The problem is that the U.S. outbreak is worse than that of many other countries — so we need to be testing a higher percentage of our population than do others.
To best understand this, consider the number of tests necessary to identify a positive case. If it’s easier to find a positive case, that suggests the virus has spread further and more testing is necessary to track the spread of COVID-19.
For instance, statistics from the United States and the United Kingdom are fairly similar in terms of how many coronavirus tests are done daily per million people. But those tests yield far more positive cases in the United States. That suggests the outbreak here requires more per capita testing than does the U.K.’s.
“We have a much bigger epidemic, so you have to test more proportionately,” said Jennifer Kates, a senior vice president at KFF.
Put another way, a larger health crisis means — even after controlling for population size — the United States will have to test more people to find out where and how the virus has spread.
And while the U.S. has ramped up its testing since March, many parts of the country still don’t have sufficient systems in place — from facilities to staff to medical supplies — for diagnosing COVID-19, researchers told us.
WHAT IF WE STOPPED TESTING?
And what about the president’s assertion that “if we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases” or none at all?
On its literal phrasing, it’s absurd, experts said.
