Although Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee and Republicans in the Legislature disagree on some details about reopening Washington’s economy in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, both sides agree that robust testing for the disease is essential.
Four weeks into stay-at-home orders that have closed schools and many businesses while preventing public gatherings, Washington has effectively flattened the curve of the pandemic. Now, the key to preventing a spike in infections and deaths is to quickly diagnose new infections and determine who has had contact with infected people. That will be crucial not only for determining which people might require medical care, but to establishing public confidence that the disease is being managed.
“The good news is we have increased our capability to analyze the testing quite dramatically,” Inslee told The Columbian’s Editorial Board on Thursday. “The problem is we do not have anywhere close to that number of sample kits.”
Republican state senators agree that testing is a priority. “This is really important to get us back to work,” Sen. John Braun, R-Centralia, told the editorial board on Friday, during a virtual meeting that included Sens. Ann Rivers and Lynda Wilson. “We can still protect our most vulnerable but get people back to work.”
Frustration over a lack of available testing reflects mixed messages that have been coming from the federal government. On March 6, President Trump said, “Anybody that wants a test can get a test”; that still remains far from reality. By March 13, Trump boasted of “1.4 million tests on board next week and 5 million within a month.” By March 18, Trump was blaming the Obama administration for “a very obsolete system,” ignoring the fact that his administration designed the tests.
As of April 23, according to the COVID Tracking Project, 4.7 million tests had been conducted in the United States. That still falls short of what experts say is required to effectively and safely open the economy. According to modeling by Paul Romer, who won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Economics, the United States will need to conduct 22 million tests per day to keep the virus in check. That amounts to about 6.7 percent of the population each day — or about 500,000 people in Washington.
Those numbers represent the high end of projections from people who have analyzed the data. But they are a jumping off point for the discussion.
Since early in the pandemic, Inslee and others have urged President Trump to employ private industry. “I’ve urged him to use the Defense Production Act on multiple occasions. Just like we did in World War II when Henry Kaiser built ships on the banks of the Columbia River,” the governor said. While the legislation dates only to the Korean War, the point is clear: The nation needs to conduct an all-out fight to combat the coronavirus.
Trump has used the act to boost production of ventilators and protective masks, but increased testing capacity will be essential for any reopening of the economy.
Inslee is focusing on metrics such as the daily number of infections and the ability to trace contacts by infected people; Republicans are stressing a desire to allow industries to propose safety rules that will allow them to reopen.
Both approaches have merit, and both likely will be used in some capacity when stay-at-home orders are lifted. But neither path will matter without public confidence that the disease is in check and is effectively being tracked. Reopening a restaurant does not do any good if customers are unwilling to visit.
