There was amazing irony Tuesday when Sen. Lamar Alexander convened a Senate hearing on COVID-19 from his home in Maryville where he’s quarantined after exposure to the virus. Three of his four witnesses also were sheltered at home.
And Alexander concluded that COVID-19 testing in the United States is “impressive” and “enough to begin going back to work.” He expressed this conclusion in his opening remarks, before hearing from witnesses.
Read his opening remarks in full here.
The “impressive” testing in Tennessee is four percent of the population with Gov. Bill Lee hoping to increase that to seven percent by the end of May, he said.
For those of you with a life, here’s the final paragraph of Alexander’s opening:
“For the near term, to help make sure those 31,000 UT students and faculty show up in August, we need widespread testing – millions more tests created mostly by new technologies – to identify those who are sick and who have been exposed so they can be quarantined and, by containing the disease in this way, give the rest of America enough confidence to go back to work and back to school.”
To be clear, I don’t disagree with Alexander. We’ve got to go back to work. It’s just that I don’t quite understand how he calls four percent testing “impressive” and keeps a straight face.
Sandra Clark is editor/CEO of KnoxTNToday.com