NEW YORK: As the coronavirus
epidemic worsens, U.S. health experts hope Joe Biden’s administration will put in place something Donald Trump’s has not a comprehensive national testing strategy.
Such a strategy, they say, could systematically check more people for infections and spot surges before they take off. The health experts say it would be an improvement from the current practice, which has professional athletes and students at elite universities getting routine tests while many other Americans stand in line for hours if they get tested at all.
We have had no strategy for this virus. Our strategy has been no strategy, said Dr. Michael Mina, a Harvard University researcher focused on use of testing to track disease.
Some experts say the lack of such a system is one reason for the current national explosion in cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
If we’d had a more robust approach and testing was scaled up as one of the tools, I think much of this third surge would would…
