LEADING THE WORLD IN TESTING: President Donald J. Trump is ensuring that Americans have access to the most advanced and robust COVID-19 tests in the world.
- President Trump has revolutionized America’s testing system, and under his leadership, our Nation has conducted far more tests than any other country.
- The United States has already conducted more than 59 million tests, and we will soon have conducted 100 million tests.
- We are now averaging 810,000 tests per day, and during July, more than 930,000 COVID-19 tests were conducted in a single day.
- India has a population more than four times as large as the United States, but has only conducted around one-third of the number of tests.
- Millions of point-of-care COVID-19 tests provide patients with a turnaround time of just 15 minutes, and tests conducted by hospitals have a turnaround time of less than 24 hours.
- The Administration is aggressively investing in the expansion of point-of-care testing and supports pooling of samples to improve turnaround times even more.
- Thanks to President Trump’s revolutionary testing efforts, we have been able to track cases better than other countries.
- Countries that have not built a robust testing system in the way the United States has have not been able to capture as full of a picture of the number of cases in their populations.
SUPPORTING OUR STATES: The Trump Administration is providing States with the testing resources they need to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.
- The Administration is supporting States’ needs for COVID-19 testing supplies, including swabs and media.
- The Federal Government has distributed more than 44 million swabs and 36 million tubes of media to all 50 States, territories, and tribes since mid-March.
- More than 2,000 community-based testing sites are either completely federally supported or enabled by the Administration’s regulatory actions.
- 94% of the 13,000 Health Resources and Services Administration-funded federally qualified health centers are now offering COVID-19 testing.
- The Department of Health & Human Services is making a large-scale procurement of rapid point-of-care tests to be distributed to nursing homes in COVID-19 hotspots.
- The Administration is providing surge testing sites to communities that have experienced recent increases in cases and hospitalizations.
- Testing sites will conduct up to 5,000 tests per day for a period of seven to 12 days.
- More than 92,000 tests have been conducted in the temporary surge testing sites that HHS has set up in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Arizona, and California.
SPURRING AMERICAN INGENUITY: The Trump Administration has given flexibility to States and the private sector to facilitate creation and development of new, innovative COVID-19 tests.
- To accelerate testing, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has allowed certain labs to begin using validated tests while their emergency use authorization requests are reviewed.
- The FDA gave States the ability to authorize tests manufactured and used within their own borders.
- The FDA has authorized 193 COVID-19 tests under emergency authorities, including 158 molecular tests, 33 antibody tests, and two antigen tests.
- Emergency use authorizations of point-of-care tests created by companies including Abbott, Cepheid, BD Veritor, and Quidel have greatly increased testing capacity and speed.
