I mean, widespread testing is so critical. You need to have widespread testing, because that is what we need in order to find out if somebody who has symptoms actually has COVID-19. And we also have to know, not only for those who have symptoms, but also for asymptomatic people, because we know that there is a high rate of transmission among people who do not have any symptoms at all.
We need that testing for the clinical reason of helping to guide clinical decisions and also to guide public health decisions, to understand what is the true rate of COVID-19 in communities. Estimates are that we need millions of tests, on the orders of 5 million to even 20 million tests a day, to be performed in order to help the country get back to normal and get back to reopening.
That’s actually why I’m so concerned about reopening now, because we don’t have nearly the capacity to do all of these tests. And you can see, I think, through the president’s own example, of why
— source democracynow.org | May 08, 2020