Wait, am I missing some context? Or is this to be taken @ face value?

[Guest]

@MaroonBells said:
The logic of an idiot on full display....

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/23/trump-joking-slowing-coronavirus-testing-335459
President Donald Trump on Tuesday insisted he was serious when he revealed that he had directed his administration to slow coronavirus testing in the United States, shattering the defenses of senior White House aides who argued Trump’s remarks were made in jest.
“I don’t kid. Let me just tell you. Let me make it clear,” Trump told reporters, when pressed on whether his comments at a campaign event Saturday in Tulsa, Okla., were intended as a joke.

“We have got the greatest testing program anywhere in the world. We test better than anybody in the world. Our tests are the best in the world, and we have the most of them. By having more tests, we find more cases,” he continued.

Administration officials as high ranking as Vice President Mike Pence have scrambled in recent days to clean up Trump’s statements from his weekend rally, where he reprised his dubious logic regarding testing rates before an arena of supporters.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people,” Trump said during the rally. “You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”

I’m fine with calling Trump an idiot, but is there any real
benefit to doing more testing?  I’m fine
with testing on an individual level, where if someone is sick you confirm it and
trace out who potentially could also be sick, but the charts are pretty much
worthless, because there’s no consistency in the measurements, and it gives
people the illusion that there is trendable data.  I think the only thing you can realistically
assume is that if number of tests is going up but number of positive cases is
going down that we’re on the downside of the curve.  Right now, you can’t really isolate what are
changes in how we test and what are changes in the spread of the disease.

[Guest]

I dont think we can/should dismiss the insights more testing can provide to Govt, health, researchers...

But yah, the primary goal has to test/trace/isolate...

[Guest]

@purplefaithful said:
I dont think we can/should dismiss the insights more testing can provide to Govt, health, researchers...

But yah, the primary goal has to test/trace/isolate...

Isn't that what everyone (well, almost) is hoping to achieve with the testing? That has been the goal all along. Only one person is focussed on or scared of the numbers as they compare to other countries. 

[Guest]

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/23/health/un...index.html

Study suggests 80% of Covid-19 cases in the US went undetected in March
(CNN)A
new study suggests that as many as 8.7 million Americans came down with
coronavirus in March, but more than 80% of them were never diagnosed.
A
team of researchers looked at the number of people who went to doctors
or clinics with influenza-like illnesses that were never diagnosed as
coronavirus, influenza or any of the other viruses that usually
circulate in winter.There was a giant spike in these cases in March, the researchers reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine."The
findings support a scenario where more than 8.7 million new SARS-CoV-2
infections appeared in the U.S. during March and estimate that more than
80% of these cases remained unidentified as the outbreak rapidly
spread," Justin Silverman of Penn State University, Alex Washburne of
Montana State University and colleagues at Cornell University and
elsewhere, wrote.
Only 100,000 cases were officially reported during that time period, and
the US still reports only 2.3 million cases as of Monday. But there was
a shortage of coronavirus testing kits at the time.

The team used data collected from each
state by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for
influenza-like illness. The CDC uses this data to track the annual
seasonal flu epidemic. It asks doctors to report all cases of people
coming in for treatment for fever, cough and other symptoms caused by
influenza."We found a clear,
anomalous surge in influenza-like illness (ILI) outpatients during the
COVID-19 epidemic that correlated with the progression of the epidemic
in multiple states across the US," Silverman and colleagues wrote.
"The
surge of non-influenza ILI outpatients was much larger than the number
of confirmed cases in each state, providing evidence of large numbers of
probable symptomatic COVID-19 cases that remained undetected."These
were people who showed up at a doctor's office or clinic with symptoms.
Most people with Covid-19 likely never sought treatment of testing for
it."The US-wide ILI surge appeared
to peak during the week starting on March 15 and subsequently decreased
in numerous states the following week; notable exceptions are New York
and New Jersey, two of the states that were the hardest hit by the
epidemic, which had not started a decline by the week ending March 28,"
the team wrote.
The
researchers could not count every single case, so they ran a series of
calculations to make sure their data fit in with what's known about
state populations and about the annual flu epidemic, as well as with the
hard data that was collected from actual testing of coronavirus
patients. They also took into account growing evidence that people
started avoiding hospitals, clinics and doctor's offices once it was
clear there was a pandemic, and after pandemic lockdowns started.
"If
1/3 of patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 in the US sought care, this
ILI surge would have corresponded to more than 8.7 million new
SARS-CoV-2 infections across the US during the three-week period from
March 8 to March 28, 2020," the researchers wrote.

Cases
fell after that. "We saw this huge peak that ended on March 22 in most
places," Silverman told CNN. Cases have been on the decline since then,
he said -- but the data the team is collecting does not include the past
two weeks.The team is now working
to try to get closer to real-time surveillance of the pandemic. The
data from the CDC comes in about two weeks after people make their
doctor visits. They hope their approach -- called syndromic surveillance
-- could complement data collected from actual testing. "In a dream
world, everyone who comes in would have a test. We would be able to get a
full scope of the pandemic," Washburne told CNN.

[Guest]

@JimmyinSD said:
I didnt watch it, but I'm sure hes joking.

Well that’s what his staff, advisors and Press Secretary (the ditzy blond who promised to never lie to us) all said - “he was just joking”

Oh but wait!  Donald himself clarifies:

https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/trump-kid-aides-argue-joking-slowing-coronavirus-testing/story?id=71404943

“I don’t kid”



Then there’s this:  $14 billion Congress approved for testing hasn’t been dispersed yet.  Basically Trump was telling the truth.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/top-democrats-trump-administration-failed-014005737.html

• Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Patty Murray claimed the Trump administration has been sitting on nearly $14 billion designated to fund coronavirus testing and contact tracing.
  
• Schumer and Murray penned a letter Sunday to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, demanding action be taken in distributing the funds, which were part of the coronavirus package that Congress approved back in April.
  
• According to a statement from the top Democrats, the Trump administration has "still failed" to distribute $8 billion of the funds, while the CDC has not used nearly $6 billion designated to fund contact tracing efforts and provide free testing to those who are uninsured.
  
• The letter came after Trump's remarks about testing at a campaign rally Saturday, in which the president called testing a "double-edged sword" and claimed he told his staff to "slow down" testing. A White House official later claimed the president was joking.
  
• At least six states saw record single-day increases since the pandemic began, and experts have reiterated that testing and contact tracing are the key to safe reopening.
  

What an unmitigated disaster by Trump’s administration, they can’t even make up their minds when he is kidding and when he’s not while Covid-19 is going like wildfire theough red states.

[Guest]

@SFVikeFan said:

What an unmitigated disaster by Trump’s administration, they can’t even make up their minds when he is kidding and when he’s not while Covid-19 is going like wildfire theough red states.

Those poor press people lol!

How'd you like to try and be on the same page with that guy 24/7?

B-R-U-T-A-L

[Guest]

@savannahskol said:

@savannahskol said:

This is easy enough to tell if Trump's lying about stopping testing.  This is from the CDC site. 
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/testing-in-us.html

Updated June 19, 2020

TOTAL TESTS

TOTAL TESTS REPORTED

26,781,666 I'll post the #'s when it is updated next.

Update! 
By today's CDC!  

Updated June 22, 2020

Total tests

TOTAL TESTS REPORTED

27,317,035 link  https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-nco...in-us.html

27,317,035 >> than 26,781.666. (Yes?)


So...either Trump was just kidding...or the CDC is lying....

I'm no whiz with calculus.... but 27M>26M.  

Updated June 29, 2020 TOTAL TESTS REPORTED

33,601,847  https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/testing-in-us.html 33.6m>27.3m>26.7m Meanwhile, jury's still out if Trump was lying.