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* The feds moved to cut off funding for testing sites several weeks ago and backed away. But it looks like it’s now actually happening…
The Trump administration is set to end federal funding and support on June 30th for 13 coronavirus testing sites, which are currently located in five states: Illinois, New Jersey, Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Texas.
Context: Pres Trump has said testing is a "double edged sword."
— Yamiche Alcindor (@Yamiche) June 24, 2020
* The governor was asked today whether he had a say in this decision…
Well, when you say ‘Did we get a say?’ we were informed.
And, you know, it’s a decision that was made by the federal government. We, obviously, all the help we can get we’ll take. But upon learning this, we immediately began to work on making sure that we’re keeping those sites open with local personnel […]
What we want to make sure is the testing is widely available and free to people across our state. And so we are right now on the street actually with an RFP to make sure that we’re taking over those sites with local personnel so we can keep doing what we’ve been doing. […]
We’ll maintain the locations of those sites for now. But we also are adding mobile testing, for example, we’re adding more sites all the time, we want to make sure that it’s easy to locate, people to get to. And so, as long as this pandemic lasts, our job here is to make people safe, to make sure that if people feel like they’ve been exposed to somebody who has COVID-19 that they can get a test as fast as possible so they can either go back to school, go back to work, whatever it is that they need to do and testing helps do that. And so that’s why we’ve been so focused on ramping up our testing, the number of testing sites, and the number of tests. You may have noticed that we had a big ramp up from early on. I was struggling, as all states were, to get the materials necessary for testing. We had just a few thousand tests going for a state as big as ours. We’re now among the top five states in the country in testing, and among the large states were the top two or three in terms of per capita testing, and I want to be number one.
Please pardon all transcription errors.
posted by Rich Miller
Wednesday, Jun 24, 20 @ 2:35 pm
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Nice job JB, great contrast between an elected official serving the public interest and POTUS serving his self-interest
Comment by been there, done that Wednesday, Jun 24, 20 @ 6:01 pm
Impressed by Gov’s comment that he wants to be number one. The testing numbers are high in IL but he’s not satisfied with the excellent standing; good for him.
Comment by Korn Fed Wednesday, Jun 24, 20 @ 8:08 pm
Follow-up article on TPM.com:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/illinois-guv-accuses-trump-of-slowing-down-testing-in-states
Comment by Keyrock Wednesday, Jun 24, 20 @ 11:35 pm