April 21, 2020 / By Arman Azad, CNN
(CNN) – The United States will have to be able to perform millions of coronavirus tests each week before restrictions can be safely lifted, economists and public health experts say in two different plans for reopening society.
The two reports differ in their recommendations for just how much testing is needed. One calls for 3 to 30 million tests a week, while the other says the country will need to be doing 20 million tests a day to get a handle on the pandemic.
Both proposals, though, cast doubt on the country’s readiness to relax social distancing measures, which some states are already beginning to do.
So far, the US has only performed about 4 million coronavirus tests, and governors have reported continued shortages of the materials needed to run tests, from chemical reagents to swabs.
20 million tests per week. This is a pipe dream and will never happen.