Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said on Sunday’s broadcast of CBS’s “Face the Nation” that officials had “no concept” of the true scope of the coronavirus outbreak because the Trump administration “didn’t see this coming.”
Partial transcript as follows:
BRENNAN: We’re back now with Connecticut Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who is on the Senate committee that oversees healthcare. Connecticut is one of the 33 states with confirmed cases of coronavirus. Senator, it’s good to have you here this morning. And I’m sorry to hear about what’s happening in my home state of Connecticut. How many cases do you think there are right now? There are two that have been reported.
MURPHY: Oh, listen, I imagine we have hundreds, if not thousands of cases in my state. I think we have no concept of the scope of this epidemic yet because we have not been able to test. And the fact of the matter is we can’t make good judgments about the measures we should be taking in Seattle or in Danbury or Hartford unless we are able to do these tests. And what is unforgivable is that the administration didn’t see this coming and didn’t put the resources in early to make sure that everybody had these tests available. But we are likely going to have to take much stronger measures as time goes on. But nobody understands where the epidemic is the worst until we get tests widely deployed.
BRENNAN: Now, the administration says there are tests in the pipeline. They said about a million were sent out for delivery, arrival on Friday. Are you seeing that in Connecticut?
MURPHY: We are not seeing that in Connecticut. We now have private lab capacity to do tests. But our understanding is that we are nowhere near that number that was proffered by the administration last year of a million. We are doing a lot more screening in our state, but we do not have the ability to give a test to everyone who wants one, as the president said was the case on Friday afternoon. And that is incredibly concerning given the fact that we saw this epidemic coming. We could have made a decision back in January or February to accept the WHO test that was available to us or start putting serious resources into developing our own test. The administration did neither and they did neither, because this president has created a culture of misinformation in which no one wants to give him bad news. And that created a disincentive in the White House and in the administration to come up with an early test.
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