Reopening the economy depends on testing. Trump's leaving that up to the states.
Let's say you own a small restaurant and are eager to reopen. It seems fairly obvious that a primary concern you might have is that you ensure your employees 1) aren't infected with the coronavirus and 2) don't become infected with it. The latter is tricky, depending in part on the spread of the virus in your community and in part on the measures you take to protect the staff. The former, though? That depends either on faith — trust that a lack of symptoms correlates to a lack of infection, which isn't always the case — or it depends on testing. It depends on being able to know when and if an employee needs to be removed from the schedule.
If your job is instead to be the county official deciding if businesses should reopen, your view of testing is a bit different. Among your responsibilities is determining the spread of the virus in the area — answering the question posed above. Reopening isn't flipping a switch. It's opening a faucet. The extent of flow of economic activity depends on the extent of the virus. Rampant infections means a lockdown until the spread is better contained. Minimal infections mean a great ability to allow people to interact. But that, too, demands knowing when and if the virus returns and to what extent. It, again, means testing.
We can put it more simply. Allowing life to return to normal depends on understanding how close to normal things actually are. And that means being able to track how pervasive the virus is.
In the middle of March, testing capacity in the United States ramped up quickly. Day after day, the increase in tests conducted nationally increased exponentially. By the end of the month, though, the number of tests plateaued. Early this month, the number jumped up again, but for another week or two, sat at a new plateau. On Wednesday, the COVID Tracking Project logged more than 160,000 tests, the second most that had been tracked in one day.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/reopening-the-economy-depends-on-testing-trumps-leaving-that-up-to-the-states/ar-BB12J3Rw?li=BBnb7Kz
He's pretty much left everything to the states so far.