Last week, VP Pence promised 1 million coronavirus test kits by the end of last week. Where are they? The death toll and the number of people infected with the coronavirus is increasing. Is it because of the “ramp up” in available testing or are there more people getting infected by community spread?

The government wants you to believe that it is because we are doing more testing. I beg to differ. Our ability to test has not increased commensurate with the number of infected. On Feb 6th, there were there 230 confirmed cases. Today, there are over 2955. That’s a more than 12 fold increase. Yet the testing kits sent out by the CDC are incomplete and can’t be used yet.

Therefore, our ability to test has not yet increased 12 fold. However, in the last 15 days, the number of deaths by the flu has increased by 100%. On March 1st, according to the CDC, there were 10,000 deaths attributed to the flu. Today that number is over 20,000.

Many people have died in the last few months from respiratory complications from flu-like symptoms and pneumonia. Or organ failure due to diminished lung capacity because of pneumonia. The CDC refuses to let those deaths be investigated and tested for the coronavirus.

Until recently the nurses from the Washington State nursing home who cared for the elderly (22 of which have died) were not even tested for weeks after the first deaths were reported. That was due to the shortage of test kits. So, if they didn’t have enough test kits to test live people, surely they couldn’t afford to tests the dead.

I surmise the rise in the number of reported cases is due to prevalent community spread. This novel coronavirus is stealthy and highly contagious. Many infected people are going about their daily lives while being asymptomatic yet highly contagious super-spreaders.

This novel coronavirus has an R0 (R Naught) of 2 to 3. This means each infected person will infect 2 to 3 others daily if they go about their normal lives. Those 3 people will do the same. And then, the 9 infected people will become 27. 27 will become 81. 81 will become 243. 243 goes to 729. 729 to 2, 187. 2,187 goes 6,561 and so on. This will happen in every cluster, in every state, every week. Those clusters will grow exponentially every day.

Our government is telling us that a million test kits have been shipped. But what they are not telling us is that they are incomplete. They are missing the reagent needed to process the test and get results. So far, they can swab people and just wait. There is a major shortage of the reagent needed to complete the tests. Furthermore, now they are trying to “flatten the curve.”

Most of our medical supplies needed by hospitals come from China. China has banned exports along with India and many other countries. Therefore there is a global shortage. Yet, we don’t have factories to produce the much-needed supplies. So, to prevent a run on hospitals suffering from severe shortages of masks, PPE’s, and respiratory equipment, our government may be intentionally delaying testing to “flatten the curve.” So, if we don’t flatten the curve many people will die. 

In a recent Politico article by Dan Diamond said:

“infighting at the Department of Health and Human Services and the need to flatter Trump impeded the response to the coronavirus.”

He added “We’re still wildly behind on testing that was botched by the Centers for Disease Control. We don’t have enough supplies, like respirators. Our hospitals and doctors are almost certainly going to face real challenges as demand spikes.”

“The Trump administration and health officials knew back in January that this coronavirus was going to be a major threat. They knew that tests needed to be distributed across the country to understand where there might be outbreaks. But across the month of February, the tests that they sent out to labs across the country simply did not work. They were coming back with errors.”

“In the case of Alex Azar, he did go to the president in January. He did push past resistance from the president’s political aides to warn the president the new coronavirus could be a major problem. There were aides around Trump – Kellyanne Conway had some skepticism at times that this was something that needed to be a presidential priority.”

“But at the same time, Secretary Azar has not always given the president the worst-case scenario of what could happen. My understanding is he did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that’s partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear – the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall.”

So now, thousands of people are going to die because Trump was more concerned about his reelection than the coronavirus.

Now is the time for local and state governments along with healthcare professionals to speak up. The governor of Puerto Rico refused to criticize POTUS while only saying complimentary things and he lost 3000 citizens. Let’s not be Puerto Rico. Because that number could easily multiply by a factor of 50. Silence is deadly.