20 or 30 million tests per day is not logistically possible.
The Harvard Center on Ethics and a Nobel Laureate seem to be socially distancing from reality.

So you're finally admitting that Trump lied when he said everyone who wants a test and get a test. Glad to see you join the real world.

Not at all.
What I posted has nothing to do with the President getting the supplies to every state to test their citizens. It is the State Governors responsibility to get their people tested.

My post was entirely about the foolish statements by the Harvard Center on Ethics and a Nobel Laureate.

You may find it advantageous to read the actual words posted and not play the Fake News game of misrepresenting fats.

You are entitled to think for yourself.
Try something new.

Come on slob, you can do better. We know you're more capable than this.

Next time you have a smoke break with Vlad and the boys, ask them some suggestions on how you can spice things up a bit with your oh so boring replies. A little less reliance on the "fake news" defense would be a good start. It's very predictable and a tip off to the fact that you're not real.

While Hogan Leads on COVID Testing, Trump Stews
The White House had said it's a 'backup' for coronavirus supplies, but the president called out Maryland's governor for getting tests on his own.
Steve Hayes

Annapolis, Maryland—

Gov. Larry Hogan began his remarks precisely as the bells of St. Anne’s Parish in downtown Annapolis rang in the 2 p.m. hour. Facing a small gaggle of socially distanced reporters and flanked by advisers and dignitaries wearing a variety of face masks—from home-sewn patterns and standard-issue medical covers to a Western-style bandit look—Hogan shared big news. After 22 days of emergency diplomacy between his state and the government of South Korea, Maryland had obtained enough kits for the state to quickly produce 500,000 much-coveted coronavirus tests.

Hogan’s wife, Yumi, a Korean-American, had kicked off the discussions—in Korean—on March 28. With a 13-hour difference between Annapolis and Seoul, the negotiations took place at all hours of the day and night. But on Saturday, a Korean Air passenger jet landed at Baltimore-Washington International Airport with the goods and Hogan and his wife were there to greet it.

The governor’s press conference was a crisp 20 minutes. A brief statement, some quick thank yous, a few questions—and out. He described the challenge, laid out the steps he’d taken to address it, and previewed next steps. When he took questions, his answers were short and direct, but efficient. He avoided discussions of his poll numbers, his political enemies, and his television ratings. And he managed to engage reporters without name-calling or self-pitying histrionics.

“The administration made it clear—over and over again—that they want the states to take the lead, and we have to go out and do it ourselves, and so that’s exactly what we did,” said Hogan.

Hogan is right.

“Don’t forget, we’re a secondary source,” President Donald Trump said on April 2, discussing efforts to obtain personal protective equipment. “The states are doing it and we’re backing them up.” He added: “The states should have been building their stockpile. …We’re a backup. We’re not an ordering clerk. We’re a backup.”

He continued the next day. “We have a federal stockpile and they have state stockpiles. And, frankly, they were—many of the states were totally unprepared for this. So, we had to go into the federal stockpile. But we’re not an ordering clerk. They have to have for themselves.”

And just Sunday, Trump shrugged off federal responsibility for testing: "Testing is a local thing. It's very important. It's great, but it's a local thing."

There’s a strong case to be made that testing ought to be a national thing. The federal government is in a unique position to build capacity, to expedite resources, to establish standards, to coordinate a vigorous testing regime and to share information that’d help control the spread of the virus. Instead, the Trump administration instructed states to be resourceful and to fend for themselves.

So, Hogan did as he was told. You’d be forgiven for thinking that Hogan’s ability to procure coronavirus tests on a massive scale would win him praise from the president and his team. Maryland is now the example of resourcefulness that the Trump administration has long pushed states to be. That didn’t happen. At Monday’s briefing, after Adm. Brett Giroir boasted about expanding testing capacity across the country, CNN’s Kaitlin Collins asked why Hogan had to go overseas for tests if they were so readily available in the U.S. Giroir seemed amused by the question. "I don’t know what the governor of Maryland is doing in South Korea," he said, smirking.

Trump, who had said 24 hours earlier that “testing is a local thing,” joined in the fun. The president mocked Hogan for his efforts and chastised the Maryland governor for not seeking help from the Trump administration. "The governor of Maryland could have called Mike Pence. Could have saved a lot of money. ... No, I don't think he needed to go to South Korea. I think he needed to get a little knowledge—would have been helpful."

What explains Trump’s incoherence? Why would a president who has complained endlessly about governors seeking help from the Trump administration suddenly criticize a governor who didn’t seek help from the Trump administration? Moments earlier, Trump had once again lectured governors to “not simply ask the federal government to supply unlimited support” and yet here he was taking shots at a governor who’d avoided begging for federal handouts.

The answer isn’t complicated: Hogan hasn’t been shy about pointing out when Trump is wrong. While Hogan doesn’t seem eager to pick fights with the president, his matter-of-fact style requires him, when asked, to challenge the steady stream of self-aggrandizing silliness that comes from Trump’s mouth. So, in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday, Hogan disputed Trump’s bizarre contention that there are already enough tests to allow governors to begin loosening restrictions on their states. The claim, Hogan said, “is just absolutely false.” He added: “It’s not accurate to say there’s plenty of testing out there and the governors should just get it done. That’s just not being straightforward.”

Maryland has conducted 71,000 tests so far, and Hogan said Monday he wanted to use the 500,000 additional tests to double the state's already aggressive goal of ten thousands tests a day.

In his press conference Monday, Hogan offered a biting assessment of the information the White House coronavirus task force had offered to governors in a call earlier in the day. Hogan said the meeting was “productive overall,” but he was plainly unimpressed by the administration’s distribution of a list of labs in each state. “They gave us detail on all of the—a list of all the labs that are in our state and in each of the states,” he recalled. “We already knew where the labs were—most of the ones on that list were actually federal labs and they said, ‘these are labs in your state.’ But they were the NIH, and FDA and Fort Dietrich and things like that. I pointed that out to the vice president. We’ve been pushing to get NIH to help us with testing for more than a month now.”

Hogan seemed particularly annoyed by the obstacles the federal government put in his way as he’s attempted to do what the administration has left to the states. In his attempts to bring the coronavirus tests back to Maryland, Hogan found the federal government more hindrance than help. “I was frosted because my team was saying that the FDA approval was going to hold it up,” Hogan told the New York Times, which added that the FDA approval didn’t come until shortly before the plane landed. “I didn’t care and was going to get the tests anyway.”

Even after he’d reached agreement with his Korean counterparts, Hogan wasn’t certain that he’d be able to get the tests. His “big” concern wasn’t a mixup with his foreign partners, logistical confusion with the travel or budgetary problems back home. Instead, Hogan was worried that the federal government would intercept the delivery. “It was a concern for us,” he said in response to the final question at his news conference. A reporter had asked about the possibility that the federal government would interfere with the delivery of the tests. Other governors have taken extra precautions to ensure that the materials they’ve obtained for their states actually make it as planned, even resorting to secret trips to get the goods. The chief physician executive at Baystate Health described his experience being harassed by federal officials as he sought to obtain PPE for his hospital, making it through questioning by two FBI agents only “to learn that the Department of Homeland Security was still considering redirecting our PPE.” He was saved after intervention from a member of Congress.

Hogan was understandably relieved to get the stuff he’d procured. “We were just happy to have successfully landed that plane at BWI,” he said. “Don’t want to get into all the details of how that came about but that was a big part of our concern.”

Reasonable people can differ, perhaps, on whether the Trump administration should have taken the lead role in securing equipment and testing supplies for the states during a deadly global pandemic or merely served as a backup. But if the federal government isn’t going to run that operation, it should at least allow the governors to perform unmolested the function the president has assigned to them.

H/T Dispatch

Then why is Richie Rich, the stubby fingered, draft dodging, orange tub of lard critical of Gov. Hogan ?

To the point from Mark Ramsey's article, the Governors and the Administration/Trump keep talking past each other on testing. There was some good info at the task force briefing yesterday about hopefully some more squabs, but I was annoyed that they kept talking about the labs. It isn't the labs. I think early on, from my local Ohio reporting, there was an issue with labs getting backed up and some tests kept getting sent to labs that were backlogged when there were other labs that were ready and able to run those tests rather than sitting and waiting a long time for results at a backed up lab. So the Administration keeps telling of available and unused capacity in the labs to run the tests, thinking they are helping direct where to send tests. What the Governors keep saying from their on-the-ground view, is the labs can only run what they are given. A test without the squab and without the right reagent can't be run by a lab waiting to run tests. It doesn't matter how many labs you have, it doesn't matter how many hundreds or thousands of tests they can run. They can't run what they don't have. It's a huge disconnect.

I'm curious what kind of discussions Cuomo and Trump have today. Trump can be influenced (easily sometimes) by what he is told if he likes a person. I believe there is family history between the two. Trump is never going to admit he is wrong on anything ever, but there is a chance that Cuomo can make Trump understand the challenges he sees with the testing and I think there is a chance Cuomo can get it through to him. I'm actually hopeful Cuomo attends the task force meeting prior to the press conference. I know they have these conference calls and everything, it just isn't getting through.

PPE supplies are ongoing and I don't think anyone is fully comfortable with what they have, but I am hearing more and more providers are saying they have enough for right now. Everyone wants more, but this situation is continuing to improve as more and more comes in.

It's moved to fighting for the test components now. The Administration was slow to come around on PPE and they have been slow to come around on the testing components and ingredients. Just because they have been slow, doesn't mean it won't too get better, it will because the states are figuring out their own ways to make squabs and reagent and finally the government is talking about it.

But just like PPE should've ramped up in February at the latest, the testing stuff should've ramped up in March, at the latest.

. . . misrepresenting fats.

haHAha

C'mon, Brer. Give a little leeway.

That might be the way they spell it in the troll farms in St Petersburg and in Ghana.

The entire “leave it to the states” thing is so transparent and stupid.

As if the virus knows or cares about a set of imaginary lines over a land mass.

Well, I guess when you say you're not responsible it's a low bar to meet and exceed.....

Maybe one of your other trolls can explain it to you......let us known when you finally understand ....

Since we haven't heard from Dr Fauci since Friday 4/17 I wanted to copy and paste some of what he said about testing that day:

The part about that that I think is often misunderstood is that if you get a test today like I did today, it’s negative. If you get a test today, that does not mean that tomorrow or the next day or the next day or the next day as you get exposed, perhaps from someone who may not even know they’re infected that that means that I’m negative. Which means if you take that to its extreme in order to be really sure, you would almost have to test somebody either every day or every other day or every week or what it is to be absolutely certain, that’s an issue. Now, the problem that I talk about when I try and compare this to other situations with what testing means to you I’m as I think most people know have been involved in HIV/AIDS for 38 years, 39 years from the very first week of HIV. So that’s what I do.

If you get a test for HIV and you are negative and you do not practice any risk behaviors, you can be guaranteed that next month, six months, one year from now, you will be negative if you don’t have a risk behavior. So there’s a big difference there about what testing actually means. So the point I think you’re getting is that although there is clearly a place for needing to test somebody for a given reason, a test means you’re negative now.

But there are other ways, I want to make sure that people understand that not to underestimate the importance of testing. Testing is a part, an important part of a multifaceted way that we are going to control and ultimately end this outbreak. So please don’t anyone interpret it that I’m down pressing testing, but the emphasis that we’ve been hearing is essentially testing is everything and it isn’t.

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-coronavirus-press-conference-transcript-april-17

Here's what they said yesterday about the testing supplies:

Admiral Giroir:

...started in the second week of March with starting an air lift because the only supplier, the main supplier of swabs at that time was a place in Italy that was completely shut off because of the outbreak in Italy. So, Admiral Polowczyk arranged gray tail Air Force planes to go to Italy to bring millions of swabs back to secure. That’s just how it started and it’s expanded since then.

Brad Smith (Director of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services - part of operations and logistics on the task force)

On the collection supply piece, I’ll talk through a couple of different kinds of collection that that can be done. For the nucleic acid test, which are the tests that are currently being done today, you generally need a swab of the nose. To do that, you need the swab, you need the collection tube and you also need the transport media that it can be transported in. We have a large, very large number of swabs already in the country, but we have secured an additional 30 million in production that we’ll be ramping up over the next several weeks.

One company, located in the Northeast, we’re going to be using Title III of the DPA to help them build four new production lines. They are currently the largest swab producer in the country and this will help them ramp up their production tremendously to over 20 million additional swabs a month. A second company located in Ohio is currently the largest Q-tip maker in the country. We’re helping them convert their line from making Q-tips into making swabs. They are actually ramping up production starting this week of swabs and we’ll be ramping up to over 10 million per month. In total, that’s over 30 million new swabs that will be coming just over the next handful of weeks.

The second piece is on the collection tubes. The collection tubes, we’ve been partnering with Oak Ridge National Lab, a Department of Energy lab based in Tennessee. They have very unique and sophisticated injection molding manufacturing capability and they are in the process of ramping that up to create collection tubes and they will be ramping up to over 40 million collection tubes a month here over the next several weeks.

In addition to the swabs, we believe that as testing progresses there’ll be other types of testing like serological testing that will occur and those samples have to be collected in different ways. Many times some of those tests will require a finger prick. So in addition, we secured over 17 million lancets, which is what you use for the finger prick, so that we have those available as well as 17 million alcohol swabs, which is what you need to clean the finger before you do the finger prick.

In addition, although folks are not talking about this much yet, we also believe that businesses across the country may want thermometers to test folks as they come into the office, and so we’ve secured over 650,000 infrared thermometers that states and businesses will be able to access to be able to test folks as they come into work. I think we’ve made tremendous progress on the collection side.

In addition to the collection side, we’ve been very focused on ensuring that the labs have what they need. To process a specimen in a lab, you really need two things. You need something called an extraction kit and you needs something called a PCR test. In order to be able to fully process a test, you need both of these things. Sometimes these things come together and sometimes they come separate. For some of our point-of-care tests, including the Abbott and [Sefia 00:40:05] tests, they come together. They are ramping up production rapidly to over 3 million of those tests per month and these are tests that did not exist even a month ago.

The second piece is on some of these large machines. They also sell complex cartridges that come together. One of the big manufacturers that has already ramped up production from about 1.6 million a month to more than twice that already and that’s already occurred. In addition to when they come together, they also sometimes come separate and we see significant ramping up of production there from our manufacturers through our public private partnerships. We’re seeing both several million more over the next few weeks of both the RNA extraction kit as well as the PCR test kit. So with that, thank you.

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-coronavirus-press-conference-transcript-april-20

For what that is worth. Talk is talk. I think providing insight into what is actually happening, or supposedly happening behind the curtain so I put it in the thread as this kind of detail doesn't often make news articles or stories.

LOL, the work pr:ck is censored here I see.

LOL, the work pr:ck is censored here I see.

No, he still seems to be posting..... 😛

LOL, the work pr:ck is censored here I see.

No, he still seems to be posting..... 😛

In lieu of a like button, I increased your Karma for that comment. I forgot we even had that.

Trump just got a testing question. And instead of remember or citing some of the things his team members and the experts have said in the past several days alone, some of which I have posted here, which would've sufficiently answered the question, he is just rambling nonsense as typical. The testing problem is difficult to answer, but the team members have tried to explain it. I wonder, does Trump even listen go them, what's he thinking about when they are at the podium talking?

Why should Trump repeat the things his task force has already said? For one to prove he can! He gives rambling nonsense answers to just about every question he gets....it boils down to, unfortunate to say this, but Trump is the dumbest person in the room. You see me come out in support and defend the people working on this, because while mistakes have been made, the people on that task force are doing what they can. I sympathize with them. I don't sympathize with Trump who can't formulate and educated or half way educated answer to questions.

Yes, it is the responsibility of the governors to get their citizens tested. It is the federal governments responsibility to make sure the states can actually do it. Louisiana can try to make the squabs and the reagent and the containers that are in short supply, they probably are trying to do that. But due to limited suppliers and everyone in the world wanting this stuff, just like PPE, the federal government needs to assist in the supply chain on all this stuff. They are now doing that. Hopefully sooner rather than later we will see positive developments on this. I have some faith they can, but it has nothing to do with Trump's ability or skill, thankfully we have career civil servants coupled with enthusiastic newer contributors behind the scenes trying to do their best. Let's hope they succeed.

They will get there. I have some confidence they will get there. But it has been slow and bumpy up til now. Things can change pretty quick in just 2 week of this whole coronavirus thing, 2 weeks from now I hope testing will be in a much better place. They are trying.

Daily average totals over 7 day periods per covid tracking project:

Sat 4/25 - Sun 4/19: 212,245
Sat 4/18 - Sun 4/12: 147,622
Sat 4/11 - Sun 4/5: 144,666
Sat 4/4 - Sun 3/29: 129,317

We gained nearly 100k tests per day over this past month.

One day last week they exceeded 300,000 tests and daily tests are coming in over 200,000 now three days in a row. If we can average 300,000 tests per day that makes over 2million a week. Gaining on it.

https://covidtracking.com/data

"Proving that President Trump got the testing supplies to the States and the Governors are finally starting to get the testing done."

Agent Orange. He's got it under control.

"Proving that President Trump got the testing supplies to the States and the Governors are finally starting to get the testing done."

Agent Orange. He's got it under control.

President Trump has stepped up and got his job done.
The Governors, almost all of them Democrats, failed their citizens and are just now beginning to test their citizens.

The Democrats, lefties and Fake News have lied throughout and are now hiding from that facts yet again.

Thank you for your prospective down in Opposite World. Now go inject some disinfectant.

Fauci believes we need to double testing. He built the gates and hurdles into the opening guidelines probably assuming it would buy time to delay opening and build up testing. It isn't delaying opening, but testing will be building. We are going to double testing soon. Last week they were tracking 150,000 tests per day. It is reasonable they will hit 300,000 tests per day this month and my opinion, I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express or anything, but I think it is also reasonable that by the end of May they may be close to 500,000 tests per day. There has been a lot of effort on this. Legit issue being, too little too late. Maybe. Maybe it should've been like this end of March instead of end of April. Fair point. This is where we are and to me it appears the numbers are going to be getting there. Diagnostic test. Antibody tests look like a complete clusterfvck. You can't trust them can you?

so - testing

2 more rapid tests became available
The Abbot test has a 15 minute turnaround. We got 50 of them from FEMA. They say we have 3 more cases coming (total 150) but our experience with FEMA is that when they say they are coming, it could be tmorrow, next week, next month, or after Christmas. Sensitivity is 85%. Based on the accuracy, it is only good as a screening tool. If someone has symptoms but a negative test they still may have it.
The BD test is more accurate but the swabs and viral media are in short supply. We are jerry-rigging the tests with our own swabs and saline media. It reduces the accuracy of the test a bit but it is better than Abbot. These were privately procured.

We only have enough of these for hospitalized patients and even with that have to be careful because the supply is not unlimited.

There are not enough tests

From the Chicago Tribune yesterday.... looks like all the bots are getting different messaging ... that they keep repeating ad nauseam....

White House releases new coronavirus testing guidelines, but experts doubt targets are sufficient

The White House released new guidelines Monday aimed at answering criticism that America's coronavirus testing has been too slow, and President Donald Trump tried to pivot toward a focus on “reopening” the nation.

Still, there were doubts from public health experts that the White House’s new testing targets were sufficient.

Monday’s developments were meant to fill critical gaps in White House plans to begin easing restrictions, ramping up testing for the virus while shifting the president’s focus toward recovery from the economic collapse caused by the outbreak. The administration unveiled a “blueprint” for states to scale up their testing in the coming week — a tacit admission, despite public statements to the contrary, that testing capacity and availability over the past two months have been lacking.

The new testing targets would ensure states had enough COVID-19 tests available to sample at least 2.6% of their populations each month — a figure already met by a majority of states. Areas that have been harder hit by the virus would be able to test at double that rate, or higher, the White House said.

The testing issue has bedeviled the administration for months. Trump told reporters on March 6 during a visit to the CDC in Atlanta that “anybody that wants a test can get a test,” but the reality has proved to be vastly different.

The initial COVID-19 test developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was contaminated, and early kits operated only on platforms able to perform a small number of tests per day. While the rate of testing increased as tests developed for higher-capacity platforms, they were still limited by shortages of supplies, from nasal swabs to the reagents used to process the samples.

Administration officials maintained Monday that the limiting factor now is actually the availability of samples from people who have been tested — either because guidelines on who could be tested are too stringent or because there are not enough health workers able to take nasal swab samples from them.

The CDC moved to address one of those concerns Monday, expanding the list of people to be prioritized for virus testing to include those who show no symptoms but are in high-risk settings like nursing homes. And Trump met with leaders of businesses including CVS, Walmart and Kroger, who said they were working to expand access to tests across the country.
“Testing is not going to be a problem at all,” Trump said later in the Rose Garden.

However, many of the administration’s past pledges and goals on testing have not been met.

Jeremy Konyndyk, a disaster preparedness expert who helped lead the Obama administration response to Ebola, said the administration’s testing plans are well short of what is needed.

Researchers at Harvard have estimated the country needs to be testing a minimum of 500,000 people per day, and possibly many more. Konyndyk said the aim should be 2 million to 3 million per day. Trump said the current total, up sharply in recent days, is over 200,000 per day.

Konyndyk said: “Over the past month, we’ve doubled or if you want to be really generous tripled the testing capacity in this country. We need to take where we are now and expand it tenfold."

The testing blueprint for states provides details missing from the administration's guidelines for them to return to normal operations, which were released more than a week ago. It includes a focus on surveillance testing as well as “rapid response” programs to isolate those who test positive and identify those with whom they had come in contact. The administration aims to have the market “flooded” with tests for the fall, when COVID-19 is expected to recur alongside the seasonal flu.

Trump and administration medical experts outlined the plan on a call with governors Monday afternoon, before unveiling them publicly in a Rose Garden press conference.

The White House announcements came as Trump sought to regain his footing after weeks of criticism and detours created in part by his press briefings.

Days after he set off a firestorm by publicly musing that scientists should explore the injection of toxic disinfectants as a potential virus cure, Trump said he found little use for his daily task force briefings, where he has time and again clashed with medical experts and reporters. Trump’s aides had been trying to move the president onto more familiar and, they hope, safer, ground: talking up the economy in more tightly controlled settings.

Republican Party polling shows Trump’s path to a second term depends on the public’s perception of how quickly the economy rebounds from the state-by-state shutdowns meant to slow the spread of the virus.

On Monday, the White House initially announced there would be a Trump briefing, but canceled it as Trump's greatest asset in the reelection campaign — his ability to dominate headlines with freewheeling performances — was increasingly seen as a liability.

But hours later, Trump it became clear Trump had other ideas. He held court in the Rose Garden for a bit less than an hour.

Spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said briefings would be held later in the week but “they might have a new look to them, a new focus to them.”

Trump said he hoped that virus deaths would end up no more than 60,000 to 70,000, slightly revising upward his public estimate of recent days as the U.S. toll neared 56,000 on nearly 1 million cases. Still, he claimed a victory given dire, tenfold-higher predictions if the U.S. hadn’t adopted restrictive social distancing measures.

On his conference call with governors, Trump suggested that many states should consider reopening schools before the end of the academic year, easing the way for parents to go back to work.

“Some of you might start thinking about school openings because a lot of people are wanting to have the school openings," Trump told the governors. The Associated Press obtained an audio recording of the call.

Testing in Illinois is ramping up - and so are the number of people testing positive....

so - testing

2 more rapid tests became available
The Abbot test has a 15 minute turnaround. We got 50 of them from FEMA. They say we have 3 more cases coming (total 150) but our experience with FEMA is that when they say they are coming, it could be tmorrow, next week, next month, or after Christmas. Sensitivity is 85%. Based on the accuracy, it is only good as a screening tool. If someone has symptoms but a negative test they still may have it.
The BD test is more accurate but the swabs and viral media are in short supply. We are jerry-rigging the tests with our own swabs and saline media. It reduces the accuracy of the test a bit but it is better than Abbot. These were privately procured.

We only have enough of these for hospitalized patients and even with that have to be careful because the supply is not unlimited.

There are not enough tests

Swabs. The searching we’ve done for swabs. Got a fantastic lot from overseas at the beginning , then, well, yeah. What’s been so frustrating is that everyone bought everything, any kind of swab, even general purpose. Our lab is using saline as well. You can never have enough masks, PPE protocol changes constantly, and gowns. Allocation keeps getting cut. Doing what we can, curve is staying level to available capacity. Every day that goes by that gets me closer to a ship date and building a supply and keeping up the protection for the front line folks like yourself is a gift.

Bhawk, what state are you in? Has any companies there started to make any of the items in shortage?

I know you are talking ordering from suppliers and distributors. I'm curious if there are companies near you that have started or will start making some of the stuff that is hard to get that might increase the supply you are seeking.

Ohio's Governor has said "whatever we can't buy we'll make". I've read that some states are 3D printing their own swabs, Ohio included. And the reagent, FDA approved a new reagent made by Thermo Fisher for them to make here. These were key developments in Ohio's plan to increase our testing.

Industrial N95 masks have been permitted for medical use now right, have they done the same for gowns/coveralls and gloves or anything else?

so - testing

2 more rapid tests became available
The Abbot test has a 15 minute turnaround. We got 50 of them from FEMA. They say we have 3 more cases coming (total 150) but our experience with FEMA is that when they say they are coming, it could be tmorrow, next week, next month, or after Christmas. Sensitivity is 85%. Based on the accuracy, it is only good as a screening tool. If someone has symptoms but a negative test they still may have it.
The BD test is more accurate but the swabs and viral media are in short supply. We are jerry-rigging the tests with our own swabs and saline media. It reduces the accuracy of the test a bit but it is better than Abbot. These were privately procured.

We only have enough of these for hospitalized patients and even with that have to be careful because the supply is not unlimited.

There are not enough tests

Thanks for the explanation. I stopped listening to the #s. As you point out, there's an enormous gap between the development of a test & getting it where it's needed.

Jared's victory lap was premature. I'm beginning to think the entire Trump clan is going more nuts than their baseline.

Scott Gottlieb (former chair FDA, informal White House advisor and frequently interviewed by media sources) says he would take an antibody test three times before trusting the results.

University of Cal San Fran researchers conducted 1,845 tests in Northern Cal town Bolinas, hitting nearly all the residents. Every diagnostic PCR test came back negative. In SF Mission District they also tested 4000 residents, 57% of the neighborhood's households, only 2% were positive. Of that, only half showed symptoms. That is a lot of tests to find 80 people, 40 of which had symptoms and either should've sought a test referral or been self quarantining anyway. I wonder, when will all these people going to be tested again. Test negative last week does not mean you will test negative this week. Such is the problem with trying to widespread test everyone.

US testing trends:

Average daily tests over a 7 day period as of May 10th = 276,308
Average daily tests over a 7 day period from April 10th = 159,998
Average daily tests over a 7 day period from March 10th = 1186

Cumulative weekly tests Monday - Sunday May 4th - May 10th = 1,934,158
Cumulative weekly tests Monday - Sunday April 6th - April 12th = 1,051,801

7 day average test results as of May 10th - positive = 8.9%, negative 91.1%
7 day average test results from April 10th -positive = 21.9%, negative 78.1%