The Media Said Trump Didn’t Have a COVID Testing Strategy. The Media Was Wrong.

The White House had the idea of opening hundreds of ambitious mobile testing sites at the outset of the coronavirus crisis. But there was a problem: Officials quickly realized that creating that many sites would use up an inordinate amount of the nation’s limited supply of testing swabs.

“We had 1.2 million swabs in the country for the month for everything,” recalls Admiral Brett Giroir, the HHS official who became the administration’s testing czar in mid-March and soon will be returning to his regular duties.

That number wasn’t going to come close to meeting the need, and it wasn’t clear how the gap would be made up. “We thought there were eight or ten suppliers of swabs,” says Giroir, “because they came under different packages, but when you found out about it, these were really repackaged swabs. There were really only two sources of these rare kinds of swabs.” One was based in Italy, the other a small company in Maine called Puritan.

“Now,” he continues, “we couldn’t get anything out of Italy because it was locked down. Literally, in those first couple days the Air Force sent a C-17 to Italy to physically go get the swabs and bring them back to the U.S.”

The swab crunch in March was just one of the obstacles to clearing the way for what needed to be an unprecedented ramp-up in testing to address the COVID crisis.

“When we first started peeking under the covers,” says Giroir, “we were going to do in two or three weeks, even early on, what the country does in a year on other sophisticated molecular tests.”