“The US is on course to be severely ravaged by the coronavirus outbreak due to a delayed and dysfunctional testing regime and misleading messaging from the Trump administration, public health experts have warned.

”As of Friday, there were more than 1,600 confirmed cases of the Covid-19 virus across the US, with 41 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control. ...

“This muddled response was exacerbated by Donald Trump who, reportedly fearful of the impact upon the stock market and his own re-election prospects, initially dismissed fears over the coronavirus as a ‘hoax’ before stating that infections were ‘going very substantially down, not up.’ The administration promised millions of testing kits would be easily available to Americans. 

”All of these pronouncements have proved untrue ...

“Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted in testimony to Congress this week that authorities had failed to respond swiftly to the spread of coronavirus. ‘The idea of anybody getting [testing] easily the way people in other countries are doing it, we are not set up for that. Do I think we should be? Yes. But we are not,’ he said. ‘It is a failing. I mean, let’s admit it.'”

— Oliver Milman, environmental reporter for The Guardian, in his piece, “Coronavirus: Trump's stumbles and testing failures pave way to disaster, experts say”