* President Trump yesterday…

Earlier today, Vice President Pence spoke with governors from all 50 states about our unified effort to defeat the virus. He had a great call. It was a great call, very positive in I’d say every way. Prior to the call, we provided each governor with a list of the names, addresses and phone numbers of the labs where they can find additional testing capacity within their states. Many, many labs. We’re providing you with the list. We’ll show it to you now if you need it. We’ll give you the details, but hundreds and hundreds of labs are ready, willing, and able. Some of the governors, like as an example, the governor from Maryland didn’t really understand the list. He didn’t understand too much about what was going on. So now I think he’ll be able to do that. It’s pretty simple, but they have tremendous capacity and we hope to be able to help him out. We’ll work with them and work with all of the governors.

Similar to the situation with ventilators, states need to assess their complete inventory of available capacity. Some states have far more capacity than they actually understand, and it is a complex subject, but some of the governors didn’t understand it. The governor, as an example Pritzker from Illinois, did not understand his capacity, not simply ask the federal government to provide unlimited support. I mean you have to take the support where you have it, but we are there to stand with the governors and to help the governors, and that’s what we’re doing and they have a tremendous capacity that we’ve already built up and you’ll be seeing that. We’re going to be introducing a couple of the folks in a little while to talk about it.

* I asked the governor’s office about this and was referred to Pritzker’s remarks yesterday at his own media briefing…

The main focus of that call was about testing. The White House is reiterating … the Coronavirus Task Force is reiterating that states have testing capacity. And I’ve said this before, but you know testing capacity is a function of how many machines do you have and if you ran them 24/7, what output could you get.

The problem is there’s a big difference between testing capacity and getting testing result and what’s the big difference in all those things in between that you need, like swabs, and viral transport medium and RNA extractor reagent. And then you’ve got to run those machines with lab techs, and if you’re going to run them 24/7, that’s three shifts.

So, what they really have said is ‘Hey, you’ve got plenty of machines out there, go to it.” And what all … the other governors who spoke, Republican and Democrats, really said the same thing which is, we all need swabs, we all need VTM. We all need RNA extractor and reagent.

And so, it was an interesting call because I think you can see what, how they’re thinking about what their responsibility is. But the fact of the matter is that when they say ‘There’s lots of testing available,’ it’s a far cry from testing capacity to actually getting testing results.

…Adding… Bloomberg last week…

A lack of reagents, swabs, personal protective gear and specialized equipment has severely hampered testing capacity, according to an April 13 letter to Birx from AAMC Chief Executive Officer David Skorton. The association represents the academic medicine community that owns many of the 175 Abbott machines across the country.

“The inability to secure adequate quantities of any of these components will result in lower testing capacity,” Skorton said. “The absence of certain components could result in testing machines sitting unused.”

In some cases, labs trying to purchase parts, reagents and test cartridges to determine if patients have Covid-19 have been unable to do so, as they have been told that the federal government or other laboratories have a higher priority, the letter said.