Sen. Patty Murray joined a group of senior Senate Democrats in introducing a road map Wednesday that would increase testing capacity for COVID-19 nationwide, a document that also highlighted what Murray called the White House’s “continued lack of urgency and leadership.”
Murray is urging Congress to allocate an additional $30 billion to ramp up testing for the novel coronavirus. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin and Chairwoman of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee Sen. Debbie Stabenow are also championing the effort.
“Public health experts have made clear we will need to do hundreds of millions of tests if we want to reduce social distancing and safely get people back to work, back to school, and back to some semblance of normal life. For that to happen, we need testing to be fast, free, and everywhere,” Murray said.
Murray is the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.
“Unfortunately, the Trump Administration’s early delays and missteps put us way behind, and because of their continued lack of urgency and leadership — we still have a lot of catching up to do,” Murray continued.
The Trump administration has defended its handling of the novel coronavirus outbreak; at one point, when asked in mid-March to rate the response on a scale of 1 to 10, President Donald Trump rated the response as a 10 and said he believed the administration had done “a great job.”
At the core of the senators’ proposal is a partisan policy paper released by Murray’s office that details the steps the country would need to take in order to implement more universal testing.
The paper urges a “whole of society” response, including building a pipeline that gets COVID-19 tests out to communities safely and quickly by identifying bottlenecks and gaps in the supply chain, potentially by accessing manufacturing powers under the Defense Production Act when necessary.
The proposal puts forth a carrot-and-stick approach to ramping up testing equipment nationwide; it recommends Congress incentivize domestic manufacturing of testing supplies with funding to cover costs of retooling factories, and potentially compel companies to share intellectual property.
“These ideas should be bipartisan, and they should be put into action as soon as possible — our country cannot wait,” Murray said.
Coronavirus testing capacity in Clark County has expanded since the region’s first case was identified in early March. According to Clark County Public Health Officer Dr. Alan Melnick, point-of-care tests have grown more common, offering faster response times for patients and helping keep state labs from becoming overwhelmed.
In a virtual address Tuesday evening, Vancouver Mayor Anne McEnerny-Ogle reported that approximately 2,000 coronavirus tests were delivered to Clark County from the state capital over the weekend.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” McEnerny-Ogle said. “We need to make sure the entire West Coast has enough corona test kits in order to closely monitor outbreaks before we can get back to normal.”
Additionally, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, R-Battle Ground, signed onto a bipartisan letter to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services last week requesting more COVID-19 tests for Washington.
The letter — endorsed by the full House delegation from Washington — reminded the leaders of both departments that the state’s testing capacity outstrips the number of actual tests that health care providers can offer patients suspected of having the coronavirus.
“Washington continues to endure a tremendous gap in the availability of sample testing kits,” the lawmakers wrote. “Without the necessary supply of sample testing kits and swabs, Washington’s ability to identify cases is undermined and has serious repercussions for public health.”
