During a Monday interview on “Fox & Friends,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams discussed the approach to combating the coronavirus as it spreads across the country.
Adams emphasized the importance of social distancing and properly washing hands, but said testing for the disease has now “reached a turning point,” which means more people are being tested at a local level.
“[W]e’ve reached a turning point,” Adams said of coronavirus testing. “Important for people to know that the CDC stood up a test in less than one week for a new virus, so that was a record, but the CDC was never designed to provide hundreds of millions of tests. It was designed to respond to outbreaks. So, we went from CDC testing, which was slow by almost design, and then we actually stood up 83 different state labs, and you saw testing increase there. But the turning point was last Thursday when the FDA approved a new rapid throughput test, which will exponentially increase the amount of new tests that can be run. … You’re starting to see more testing at the local level.”
He added, “Again, we’ve reached a turning point, and it’s because of the private industry.”
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