Joining us today, and good morning from the west coast. I know it is afternoon on the east coast, but good morning from where i am. Thank you all for being part of this conversation today. What ive heard constantly from people in my state, and i know this is true from every one of us on this call is where are the tests . It has been a constant refrain from the beginning until today, and finally, getting an answer a clear, reliable 1 is critical if we are going to safely go back to Something Like normal in our country. Today we will be talking about our roadmap to rapidly expand testing. To start, we will have an Expert Opinion about why this is so important. I want to thank dr. Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public health association, and he will get us started today. Thank you very much for having me today. Let me point out that today, we have addressed the disease by using two important efforts. One, we had a Massive Public education effort to tell people what the risk of this disease is and to learn how to do some behavioral things such as good handwashing, respiratory protectivepersonal gear, particularly for Health Workers no masks, gloves, gowns, and facial shields, and now we talk about facial coverings for individuals that have to go out. The really major intervention has been physical distancing comedy social distancing we are all talking about where we are staying away from one another, particularly if you are not an essential worker. Clearly, testing has been in far,ette inadequate so and that has given us very, very limited information of the scope of this disease in our population. Essential Health Component of any opportunity we have to return to work or to play together. Testing will tell us who has the disease, who has had the disease, who is at risk for getting the disease, meaning that if you are negative, you are still at risk of getting the disease, and through a range of Public Health efforts, understanding the troubles of the disease in the community, coupled with knowing how many people are sick and how many will allow us to ultimately open up our community and society back to near normal. It also tells us how close we are to immunity, which is a Public Health principle that says if i have the disease, you will not get the disease. We know that testing is essential to be adequate for the number of people we have in our country. We cannot do Contact Tracing without an adequate number of people and an adequate number of tests. Willng the test results ,llow us to target resources both as quarantine on people who may have been exposed, and to adequately treat people who get sick. I just want to point out that the fastest way to be safe at home is safe away from to know your test status. We are here today to talk a bit about the importance of testing and how we can get that ramped you,nd i want to thank senator murray, for your efforts in having me today. I know senator schumer wanted to talk to us yes, i am. I was on before. Much. Nk you very thank you, dr. Benjamin. I want to thank you for the done. Work you have let me begin by saying that i hope all of you, your loved ones are healthy during this very difficult time for all of us. Here, it ist utterly mindboggling that at that theical time administrations testing regime is at best incomplete and at worst in shambles, that the president is choosing to focus his time and energy on a vendetta against the who. That is not leadership. Its not going to improve the situation either healthwise or economically for the american people. York, the coronavirus continues to take a terrible toll. My state and hometown are suffering enormous and heartbreaking losses every day. The impact is overwhelming. You dont meet a person who does not know someone who has passed away. At the same time, we are encouraged that the rate of hospitalizations is moving in the right direction. While we are grieving at the loss of so much human life, there is beginning to be a glimmer of hope. Everyone on the front lines has done an amazing and heroic job responding to the health crisis, and so many others continue to put their lives on the line, ourg their jobs to keep city and country operating. We are grateful to them. We are not out of the woods yet. Our focus continues to be on addressing the urgent crisis in our Health Care System and economy, but we also have to look ahead and prepare for the when things start to return to normal. As my colleagues and i have been saying for months, the only way we can get our economy back up and running is by addressing the health crisis. The two issues cannot be. Eparated until a vaccine or therapeutic is widely available, the best way we can assess the potential readiness of the country to restart Major Economic activity is through comprehensive, widespread sophisticated testing. Than a month ago, President Trump said more than a month ago anybody who needs a test gets a test. He was very, very wrong. Testingater, our capacity is woefully inadequate for the crisis, much less to reopen our economy. We have testing shortages and communities in new york and across the country. Theres a shortage of essential components, and too often, this is even more severe in poor communities and in black and brown communities as well. We have to ramp up testing so it can be done on a broader scale. We need to get results back quickly. Thats going to take a national, major effort. It is going to require an organized coordinated focus and effective plan, not exactly the Trump Administrations strong suits. Today, Senate Democrats are outlining challenges to this issue of testing as well as our. Oadmap for a solution Senate Democrats are going to do two things first, we are presenting an accurate picture of the challenges our country is and testing, not issuing false or misleading claims. This is not china. This is the United States of america. We need our government to be truthful. Second, we are laying out a plan for a comprehensive National Testing strategy and major new investment that includes bolstering the supply and manufacturing chain, expanding testing for all and expanding reporting and contract tracing. We need to have testing kits widely available across america so we can beat this pandemic and help those affected. We need to track the results in real time so we can quickly spot flareups. We need a dedicated domestic , and if the president tries to ham handedly fully states into reopening portions of the country and send people back to work prematurely or without appropriate testing in place, he could risk undoing all the progress we have made from social distancing towards fighting this pandemic. If this is mishandled, the disease could research and become an even greater challenge, so we cannot afford to wait. We need to study and adapt to the coronavirus right now. Testing is the best tool we have to fight the virus today, to know who is affected, who is infected, who is not. It is critically important to our health and wellbeing and every person in our country. We will need bipartisan support in congress for this effort, and just as importantly, we will need the president and the Trump Administration to step up and get the job done. Thank you, senator schumer and, hopefully, everyone on the our report. Let me just say the bottom line the worlde u. S. Lags in testing, and we lead the world and covid19 cases, and there is a direct relationship. The first case was diagnosed in Washington State on january 20. After 12 weeks, the appearance of over 600,000 cases and over 25,000 lives lost of our loved lag a National Testing strategy as has been talked about, to reliably and consistently test patients across the country. There are a lot of comparisons we make in our report with other onntries, but let me focus one because it is a picture into what has happened. The United States and south korea diagnosed their first covid19 case on the same day, january 20. By march 17, just eight weeks west testingkorea 40 times more people per million in their country. This continued, and as south koreas cases stayed close to level, as you can see in our graph, we continued to spike. As of yesterday, south korea had just over 10,000 cases, and we have now over 600,000 cases. We remember on march 30 when the president said that no one was raising the issue of testing with him, and on that day and in our report, we quote governors, democrats and republicans, on the phone with him who were pleading at that time, march 30, for more testing. We also have a graph that goes 17ough what happens january when the World Health Organization adopted a diagnostic test that other countries around the world began using. The u. S. Did not use that. The administration wanted their own test. Bottom line, we need an aggressive National Testing action plan to save lives, to get people back to work, to know where we need to focus, to know how to focus precious resources. The bottom line is we need testing, testing, testing. I hope you will take a look at the specific outlook report. Want tooing what we all do, which is get people back to work. Ist we all want to do, which save the lives of people in crisis now. It has to involve testing to save lives. I would conclude by saying that when the president talks about each individual state having to do this, i think back to what is happening around the world. This is theg beijing strategy versus the shanghai strategy. We talk about the country of china or the country of south korea. We are the United States of america, and if we are going to keep our people safe and save lives and put people back to work, we need a National Action plan for testing. Im going to turn it over to senator murray to talk about the democratic proposal. Thank you, senator stabenow. As families and communities continue grappling with this covid19 pandemic and as healthcare care workers hustle around the clock to save lives and essential workers keep the lights on and shelves stocked Grocery Stores and pharmacies and so much more, Public Health experts have made it clear we need to do hundreds of millions of test if we want to reduce social distancing and safely get people back to work, back to school, and back to some semblance of normal. For that to happen, we need testing to be fast, free, and everywhere. Unfortunately, as you just heard , the Trump Administrations early delays and missteps put us way behind. Because of their continued lack of urgency and lack of leadership, we have a lot of catching up to do. In fact, it was reported yesterday testing has slowed down now almost 1 3 over the past week as glitches and shortages continue to impede progress. At our current pace, getting 100 million tests done would already take far too long. We absolutely cannot afford any backsliding, which is what democrats are introducing our roadmap to get things back on track fast. You might think a Strategic Plan to rapidly ramp up testing would already be put together, but since it is not, first and foremost, we want to require the Trump Administration to develop and communicate a detailed Strategic Plan to rapidly scale and optimize covid19 testing. This is a national crisis. We need a federally coordinated whole of society response, not one that leaves each state to fend for itself or fight its neighbors for supply and capacity. Secondly, we are calling for 30 billion in emergency funding to enable faster scaling of testing and development of different s, particularly Rapid Response tests. This funding will play an Important Role in optimizing our National Supply chain to address the shortages wherever they arrive to make sure we have plenty of test that offer rapid, reliable results and adequate supplies, equipment, and workforce capacity to actually conduct, analyze, and follow up on those tests, but it is not enough to just increase testing capacity. We have to make sure it reaches including some of our most vulnerable and overlooked, which means our communities of color, tribes, rural communities, people with disabilities, older individuals, and underserved communities. We are already seeing this virus do the most phone do the most harm to people and communities our Health Care System has left behind. We have a responsibility to do everything we can to stop these tragic patterns from repeating themselves. Next, we need a robust Public Health infrastructure to maximize the impact of these efforts. Testing may be the first step in our path forward, but we have to bolster it with the public followcapacity needed to testing with tools like a massive increase in contact aacing, which will require major investment in Public Health workers and with reliable transparent data recording and surveillance that allows us to use these test results to identify outbreaks, demographic trends, and their potential problems, and of course, we have to make sure this whole effort is transparent, accountable, and driven by science and experts, not politics. Democrats understand just how important getting this done is to putting our country on a path through this crisis. I do hope republicans who are hearing from the states about the need for more testing and have said they want testing expanded will work with us to require the administration to develop a national plan, provide emergency funds, optimize our supply chain, support every robustty, and build a Public Health was ponce and workforce. These ideas should be bipartisan and should be in action as soon as possible build a robust Public Health response and workforce. Thank you, and let me turn over to senator durbin. Thank you. We cannot safely and sheltering in place until we have testing every place. Why . Our enemy, our threat, the coronavirus, does not give a if youreamn as to black, white, brown, rich, poor, the naturalized citizen, fact is if you are breathing, coughing, sneezing in america, we need to test you and we need to make sure that we are finding out the threats to others who are currently spared this infection but could be victims of it if we dont move quickly. We know the testing has to reach beyond the current limits dramatically beyond if we are going to move from the shelterinplace to the next stage of opening our economy. If you look at the various groups around america, you can see the disparities already and treatment being reflected in the infections and deaths. In chicago and illinois, we have done something most places have not done. We have done extensive Data Collection about the people who have an infected. Sadly, it has illuminated a grim reality. Lack, africanamerican residents make up 3 the population in chicago. 70 70 of the fatalities from this covid virus. It is a dramatic question of dying rates among africanamericans that are nearly five times the rates of their white counterparts. We are also finding disparities when it comes to those who are hispanic and in the undocumented population. Yesterday, cook county structure hospital told me that literally half of those who died from covid virus were uninsured, suggesting that many of them themhispanic, many of undocumented, and many of them did not come into our Health System until they were literally dying from this disease. Secondly, we know that this is an issue which affects us downstate. And downstate areas and rural areas, we are finding the same challenges. With on a phone call farmers and add leaders across the state. One of my friends has been raising cattle in the beef industry for many generations. He has had three loads of cattle ready for the market that have been held back for three weeks because there is not a processor or packer in downstate illinois that will take them. Why . Because the workers who are by and large hispanic, african, and work, refused to come to because it is not safe. They understand as we do, too, that they could die just by showing up for work. If we are going to change this dynamic and move from where we are today to opening this economy, theres a path that has to be followed. We need a Manhattan Project. Certainly it involves a vaccine, the first thing we committed ourselves to and will continue to urge through every possible aspect, but certainly, we need these two levels of testing which we are dramatizing this morning, making sure we can determine if people are positive or negative in terms of infection, and secondly, the test to see what antibodies are being carried by each individual. This should not be a partisan matter in any way whatsoever. The reason we are taking the initiative is that others have not. We urge republicans to step up and join us. Make this as bipartisan as the rollcall of the cares act. Lets have republicans and democrats together with the Manhattan Project of testing so we can start to realistically talk about opening the american economy. Thank you. Now we will take questions to any of us on this subject first. This subject first. Please, ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, you may do so by pressing 10 at this time. Our first question comes from cbs news. Thanks for having this call. This is to dr. Benjamin. Im wondering if you can tell us any more about the issues you are hearing in individual states about the abbott machines, in. Articular im wondering if it is a Lab Infrastructure issue, supplies what are you hearing from the labs. Second, i heard from a doctor who cannot order one of those machines. I wonder if that is a widespread problem. What i understand is both supplies and some of the technology itself. I would jump into say on a different piece of this, the mayor of detroit was the first to get the 15minute test from abbott. It is an issue of getting the number of test kits and so on. But i will tell you, and this reinforces what were doing on the call, he has been using this to put Police Officers back to work. Onhad 500 officers out 14day quarantine who were exposed but did not know if they had the virus. Every day now, they are testing people with the 15minute test and officers are able to get back to work and he told me the sense of relief on peoples faces was amazing to see, but knowing that they knew what was happening to them. Theres a lot to get to the point where we can do this everywhere, but we are already seeing it make a difference in detroit. Thank you. Our next question will be from pam cochran, new york times. Thank you for doing this. Do you see this blueprint becoming part of a phase four package down the road . And looking ahead to future legislation, do you see a resolution as well on providing additional funds for hospital, state, and local governments . Yes, we do hope this becomes part. If the president will do this, as my colleagues have mentioned, we have to do it because this is so important to the future health of the economy and the country, so we would very much like it to be part of the next covid package because it is so necessary. Let me just answer its not on topic, but i will answer it. Secretary mnuchin and i spoke this morning, and this afternoon, the democratic staff, house, and senate will be getting together with the secretarys office, and we see no reason why we cannot come to an agreement. We democrats believe that we need more money for small business, but we need it to go to the people who are under banked and underserved. Many of these smaller businesses who do not have a connection to a larger bank are not getting help. Programthe parts of the that are most important have run out of money and are not included in the republican proposal, but second, we think there is just as much need for our hospitals and health care ,orkers and for our police fire, and people in the local governments. Immediately or we will have millions of people of work. Can i just answer . The reason why this is so next package is we are going to have to continue to put a lot of money out there for hospitals, for small whonesses, for individuals are unemployed, for schools, until we get this in control, but more importantly, if people the confidence to go back to work. The ability to have enough supplies to meet the demand in our hospitals all of those things depend on peoples confidence and the ability to go back to work, and that is why testing is so key. If you do not know, you are going to stay home. You are not going to go to small businesses. If you dont know, this is going to continue to spread and hospitals will be overwhelmed and we will have to continue to fund them at huge ratios. That is why this is such a key critical component. Thank you. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about an action at the centers for medicare and thecaid services, about medicare reimbursement rate for covid testing. Do you think this is adequate to encourage more labs to get off the sidelines and increase testing . And a second question do you see it being necessary for cdc to alter the clinical criteria for who is eligible to be tested and who should be prioritized . Patty, do you want to take that . I would just respond this way that is one principle that may or may not have a huge impact, but if it is not part of , and we aread plan just doing this while shot process, we are not going to get where we need to be. That is why our plan requires the administration to have a comprehensive plan with goals at the end of it. Theres lots of ways to do that but you cannot just do one thing today, one thing tomorrow, hope that it works. That is what has been happening and it has not. I want to underscore what patty said. We need a comprehensive plan that deals with all aspects. The administration seems to every so often focus on one issue and then move on to the next with no plan, no forward thrust. As debbie mentioned, we are set back in testing. We need a comprehensive plan that deals comprehensively with the need for testing, the supply lines, the supply chains that help create the tests, and tracking, but we need all of this together in one, large plan. The administration is at best scattershot, and at worst just chaotic. Washington journal prime time, especially evening edition of washington journal, on federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. Washington republican congressman dan newhouse on the republican response in his district. Join tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan. Television has changed since cspan began 41 years ago, but our Mission Continues to provide an unfiltered view of government. Already this year, we brought you primary election coverage, the president ial impeachment process, and now the federal response to the coronavirus. 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