- The main story concerns the coronavirus and the desperate desire to get outside.
- Alex Jones, a protest leader, threatens to eat his neighbors to prevent his kids from starving.
- The US government, led by Jared Kushner, declares victory over the virus despite the death toll surpassing the Vietnam War.
- Widespread testing is crucial for managing the pandemic, but testing has been scarce in the US.
- The lack of testing has been called the original sin of America's pandemic failure.
- Broad testing is necessary for safely reopening society, but the US is far from meeting the testing targets.
- The CDC's delay in developing effective tests and bureaucratic hurdles hindered private sector labs from developing their own tests.
- By the end of February, only 472 people in the US had been tested, while South Korea had completed 55,000 tests.

- The US has struggled with testing for COVID-19 compared to South Korea
- The US response was initially arrogant and slow, leading to global shortages of testing components
- There were shortages of swabs and reagents needed for testing, and the federal government did not provide enough assistance
- Trump initially denied the existence of these shortages but eventually invoked the Defense Production Act to increase manufacturing
- Diagnostic testing in the US has been slow and mistakes were made, leading to limited testing criteria
- Jared Kushner's claim of the US response being extraordinary is criticized
- Antibody tests are important for public health officials but it is unclear if having antibodies means immunity or how long immunity would last
- There are over 150 antibody tests on the market, but only 10 are FDA authorized and many are unreliable with high false positive rates.

- The US is still in need of more testing for both diagnostic and antibody purposes
- The president has repeatedly lied about the availability of tests
- Health experts say the US needs 5 million tests per day by June to safely reopen
- The president's claim that testing capacity is sufficient is a lie
- The assistant secretary of health confirms that the US cannot do 20 million tests a day or even 5 million tests a day
- The lack of preparedness and slow response has led to preventable deaths
- Testing is crucial for a return to normalcy and should unite everyone in the country

- The US has struggled with testing for COVID-19 compared to South Korea.
- Testing has been scarce in the US, hindering efforts to manage the pandemic.
- The lack of testing has been called America's original sin in its pandemic failure.
- The US government initially denied testing shortages but eventually increased manufacturing.
- Diagnostic and antibody testing are still needed in the US.
- The president has repeatedly lied about the availability of tests.
- Health experts say the US needs 5 million tests per day by June to safely reopen.
- The lack of preparedness and slow response has led to preventable deaths.
- Testing is crucial for a return to normalcy and should unite everyone in the country.

As experts encourage widespread coronavirus testing, John Oliver discusses exactly how much testing the US has done, the difference between diagnostic and antibody tests, and why we need to do more. 

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♪♪ Let's move on to our main story tonight, which yet again, concerns the coronavirus.

Very much the Timothy Chalamet of viruses, in that you barely had time to learn its name before suddenly, it was fucking everywhere.

It's been another tough week, and everyone is absolutely desperate to get outside.

Perhaps no 1 more so than Alex Jones, who's gone from leading protests against stay-at-home orders at the Texas Capitol to this.

I've extrapolated this out, and I won't have to for a few years since I got food and stuff.

But I'm literally looking at my neighbors now and going, am I ready to hang them up and gut them and skin them and chop them up.

Obviously, there's the ass-eating promise, but even before that, he's threatening to feed his neighbors to his daughters, which is weird enough before you consider he also has a son.

Why doesn't he get to eat any human flesh?

And finally, Alex Jones is making plans to desperately devour his neighbors several years out, while also wearing an $8,000 watch.

You know, I'd maybe at least consider selling that, or I don't know, planting a garden before stooping to actual cannibalism.

But look, things are clearly dire right now.

The coronavirus death toll is currently over 60,000 in the U.S., meaning that in just 3 months, it's killed more Americans than the Vietnam War, which is a truly grim milestone.

And that is what made it so jarring to see Jared Kushner and his resting Do You Know Who My Father Is face basically declare victory over the virus on Wednesday.

The government, federal government, rose to the challenge and this is a great success story.

And I think that that's really, you know, what needs to be told.

I think you'll see by June, a lot of the country should be back to normal, and the hope is that by July, the country's really rocking again.

Oh, it'll be really rocking again, will it, Jared?

It's incredible to see someone with the skin of a newborn baby birthed in a tub of Neutrogena talk like a middle-aged dad desperately trying to connect with his teenage son.

But before we can celebrate Jared's great success story and get back to our rocking selves, we badly need to work out how we can reopen parts of society safely.

And experts say that really means 1 thing.

Every public health official says, testing, testing, testing.

Testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing!

SpongeBob shouldn't be taking joy rides in his open water convertible while wearing a cowboy hat and no mask until we have adequate testing in place.

2 out of 3 of those are extremely high-risk categories, so get back in your fucking pineapple, SpongeBob!

In managing a pandemic, there is almost nothing more important than widespread effective testing.

It is your only chance of tracking and containing the spread from the start.

Unfortunately, tests have been alarmingly scarce in this country, despite the fact the president has repeatedly claimed that that is not the case, even declaring in early March that anyone who wants a test can get a test.

But that wasn't true then, and it still isn't true now.

As you probably know from seeing countless stories like this.

Don Clements in Largo, Florida, has been sick since Friday.

Her daughter went through it 2 weeks ago.

She has all the symptoms, no flu, and can't get tested.

I'm immunosuppressed with some health conditions.

I'm running a fever and I have chest congestion.

A woman who is symptomatic, immunosuppressed, and living in an ALF, sounds like exactly the kind of person that you would want to have tested.

Now, ALF incidentally refers to Assisted Living Facility and not the 80s sitcom Alien.

Although, if she were living in ALF, she should probably still get tested since I've heard rumors that this whole thing started when someone ate a bowl of Alf soup.

Months into the spread of this virus become more widely available.

In fact, our testing failure has been called the original sin of America's pandemic failure.

Because had testing caught the cases in this country early, we could have managed the virus through contact tracing and targeted quarantines, but that did not happen.

So the virus spread widely, forcing us to use the blunt instrument of making everyone stay at home.

A lack of testing goes to the very heart of how we got into this situation, and the truth is, broad testing is our only safe way out of it.

While experts disagree on the exact number of tests that we need to be doing to safely reopen.

The lowest estimate is 500,000 a day, with others saying a good target would actually be 35 million a day.

And at present, we've only been performing around 200,000 a day.

So we're not even hitting the lowest target here.

Think of it like this, if our goal were to eat an Italian dinner, we're currently stuck in traffic on our way to an olive garden.

We're not even halfway to arriving at the worst place that technically qualifies.

So if our testing shortage has caused this much damage, this much disruption, and is still not fully resolved, we thought tonight might be a good time to ask, what the fuck happened?

And to do that, we're gonna be looking at 2 major types of tests.

Diagnostic tests, which tell you if you have the virus right now, and antibody tests, which tell you if you've previously had it.

The most common form of these involve having a giant swab shoved up your nose.

And I don't think anyone's described the experience better than this woman.

They just pulled my braid out through my nostril.

That woman took my soul out of my head with that Q-tip.

She actually grabbed the back of my head, like we were lovers, but instead of kissing me, she was impaling my brain.

Unless, of course, your brain is being pulled out through your nostril by Adam Driver.

Pull my heart out through my ear, you meaty oak tree.

Impale my brain, you unacceptable monstrosity.

Now, diagnostic tests are key, especially at the beginning of an outbreak.

Because in mid-January, shortly after this virus was discovered, the World Health Organization recommended a diagnostic testing protocol.

But, rather than follow it, the CDC decided to develop its own more complicated test, which wasn't inherently a bad idea.

Unfortunately, though, they chose to manufacture testing kits themselves.

And as those kits were shipped around the country in early February, it became clear that due to chemical contamination during manufacturing, the tests didn't work properly.

But what made it even worse was the CDC then took weeks to come up with a workaround that would make them usable.

And just losing days in a pandemic when a virus can spread exponentially is a huge problem.

Losing an entire month is absolutely catastrophic.

And what's particularly frustrating here is that some private sector labs were willing to jump in and develop their own tests.

But throughout February, they were slowed down by having to jump through bureaucratic hoops like this.

1 of the things is they needed a document FedExed across the country before they could look at the document.

I could electronically transmit it, but they couldn't look at it until it was FedExed.

And so from a couple days after February 4th, all the way to February 26th, they didn't have a test.

In fact, the FDA suggested to him that he send a printed paper hard copy of the submission and a CD or thumb drive with an electronic copy.

And where would you even find a blank CD?

Or did the FDA really expect everyone to burn over Road Jams 2005?

Because no fucking way, FDA, that's a classic mix right there.

It's got all the songs from American Idiot in the order that they appeared on American idiot, but better because they were stolen off Line Wire.

And while that requirement was quickly lifted, it was just 1 of many logistical and bureaucratic challenges that slowed things down at the worst possible time.

In fact, it wasn't until the last day of February that the FDA finally did something that private labs had been begging them to do and allowed those labs to develop and use their own tests without waiting for authorization.

But by that point, a whole month had gone by, and incredibly, we'd only tested, in the whole country, 472 people in total.

Even as, as we've since learned, the virus was spreading undetected in multiple major cities.

Now, by contrast, on the exact same date, South Korea, which has just one-sixth our population, had completed 55,000 tests.

And even well into March, Alex Azar, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, didn't seem too concerned about that disparity, because watch how he responded when he was asked about it.

But my question is, why was South Korea able to do this in a week, and it seems to be such a struggle for the United

Well, it's not about ability, it's about what they needed to do.

They had an explosive, immediate outburst and cluster becoming 1 of the world's epicenters of the disease.

South Korea has tested a bunch of people for coronavirus and found a bunch of people with coronavirus.

We've tested almost no 1 for coronavirus and found almost no 1 with coronavirus.

To the best of our knowledge, the situations could not be more different.

Although again, the best of our knowledge is essentially no knowledge.

Response seemed to be characterized by an arrogant belief that for some reason, coronavirus was never going to come to America, because, I guess, it just wouldn't dare.

And unfortunately, we're currently living in the consequences of those early failures.

Because by moving so slowly, we now find ourselves in the midst of serious global shortages of crucial testing components.

Just listen to the scientist that you saw earlier explain the lengths that he's had to go to in order to get what he needed from the test manufacturer, Roche.

1 of the hardest things to find, the single-use plastic tips that contain the chemicals and the specimens.

This is what we're looking for, basically.

We tweeted at Roche and the world to get these things in, like you

You should not have to tweet at a company to get parts for essential lab equipment.

Not only should there be a better process for that, but also, that's just not what Twitter is for.

As we all know, Twitter is for exactly 3 things.

Possum Every Hour, Chrissy Teigen, and the official account for Beef.

And if you don't follow that, you absolutely should.

Because that's where you can find tweets like, "'Nicely done, beef." Which is beef tweeting encouragement at beef, and is a level of unconditional self-love that frankly, more of us should aspire to.

And you can also find their actual Mother's Day tweet, "'To the moms who wrangled us, fed us, and cared for us, we wish you a hashtag happy Mother's Day with a picture of a mother cow and a baby cow who will both presumably 1 day become beef.

At which point, I'm pretty sure the account will tweet, nicely done, beef.

Even the chemical reagents needed to run the tests, or the swabs that impale people's brains have to be specifically manufactured.

Something that the president seemed absolutely fascinated by.

But it's a little bit like, so this is the swab.

And the backstory to him deciding to personally bring a Q-tip to that briefing to proudly show everyone is so painfully obvious.

Someone showed him the long swab and he said, isn't that a Q-tip?

And he said, but they're both tall, thin and white like all my girlfriends, and they said, good 1 again, Mr.

And they said, here's a Q-tip, and he said, that 1 is short, thin and white like my girlfriends when they were children.

And they said, Exactly, and he said, I have to tell America, and then he did.

But second, and much more importantly, for months, things like swabs were very hard to find, and multiple governors expressed distress that the federal government was not stepping in to help smooth out the supply chain.

There are things like shortages on swabs that we don't have anywhere in America.

We need some assistance from the federal government when it comes to swabs and reagents.

To do the testing, you need testing equipment.

And you need all of these things at a capacity that does not now exist.

To do proper testing, you need proper equipment.

It's why, generally, you prefer a doctor with a thermometer over 1 who just thinks he has a real natural knack for guessing a person's temperature.

And in response to those concerns, Trump initially claimed that the problems those governors were experiencing simply didn't exist.

That reagents and swabs are so easy to get.

And this has been something that hospitals and states have been saying there are shortages for more than a month now.

We have millions of them coming in very soon, and many of them already have been ordered, and the governors don't know quite where they are, but they'll be finding them fairly soon.

These are crucial medical supplies in the midst of a pandemic, not a fucking scavenger hunt.

The swabs are on me, where imaginations run wild.

Each level I have, the pages are piled, where imaginations run wild, and the pages are piled.

The swabs for nationwide diagnostic testing are on a bookshelf.

Now, Trump did eventually invoke the Defense Production Act to ramp up manufacturing of swabs, but he did it late.

And again, Timing is absolutely everything here.

From the start, the story of diagnostic testing is of us making mistakes and wasting valuable time in fixing them, meaning tests were heavily rationed and often only given to people who met extremely narrow criteria, which makes it especially frustrating that in his victory lap this week, Jared Kushner said this.

I actually said, you should look at how did we do this so quickly, and what's really happened is truly, truly extraordinary.

Taking months to do what other countries did in weeks is not extraordinary.

The only thing that's extraordinary here is that the most punchable face in America somehow looks like it's never been touched by human hands.

Does it just absorb fists like a bowl of heavy cream?

What's your secret, you translucent sociopath?

And look, the failures in diagnostic testing have led us to our current situation, where we still don't know how many people in this country have or have had the coronavirus.

You may have even found yourself wondering, wait, did I have it earlier this year?

I had that cough and I did feel a bit sick.

Well, that actually brings us to antibody tests, which detect whether your body produced the antibodies that fight the coronavirus.

Now, finding out if people have those is really helpful for public health officials, as it gives them a better sense of where the virus has traveled and how many people have recovered.

But, on an individual level, you have to be very careful when talking about antibodies, because too often, the shorthand is, if you have them, you're immune.

Here is Governor Cuomo doing basically exactly that.

That would mean that you're no longer contagious, and you can't catch the virus because you have the antibodies in your system, which means you can get to work, you can go back to school, you can do whatever you want.

I, for 1, would absolutely love the opportunity to have my current panic attacks outdoors.

Sometimes, you want the walls to close in on you only figuratively, and that's okay.

And look, it would obviously be great if the presence of antibodies meant that you were immune from reinfection.

And there is a good chance that it does mean that, but We don't know that yet.

Because COVID-19 is still so new, we're still not sure exactly what antibody levels might be needed to make you hypothetically immune, how strong that immunity would be, or how long it might even last.

And to his credit, Anthony Fauci is constantly trying to point this out.

We do not know exactly what an antibody titer means.

I mean, there's an assumption, a reasonable assumption, that when you have an antibody, that you are protected against reinfection.

But That has not been proven for this particular virus.

And just because something is probably true doesn't mean you can automatically assume that it is.

I mean, did Nintendo create and release COVID-19 as part of a plan to boost sales of Animal Crossing to a newly captive audience?

We all basically agree, but we can't say it with any certainty yet.

So, antibody tests could actually mean significantly less right now than people understandably want them to, and that is assuming that they're even accurate, which is not necessarily the case.

Because while the FDA clearly slowed things down far too much when it came to diagnostic tests, they over-corrected hard when it came to antibody tests.

Basically, giving a green light to make tests with essentially no oversight.

And as a result, there are now over 150 of them on the market, none of which are FDA approved.

In fact, only 10 are even FDA authorized, which means little more than that some forms have been submitted.

And researchers who've looked at tests have found that while a few are reliable, many, many, many more just are not.

We have the wild, wild west for testing right now.

The FDA has all but given up its oversight responsibility for the tests we have on the market.

Many of them are nothing short of a disaster.

Right now, if you were to test for antibody in most places in the United States, over half the tests would be false positives.

Many of the tests are garbage, and over half of the positive test results right now would be wrong.

At that point, why not just have people go to a guess your coronavirus antibody level booth?

Just 5 bucks and Jim here will guess yours if he's wrong, and there's basically no way of knowing if he is, then you get a stuffed giraffe.

So here we are, months into this crisis, still badly in need of more testing, both diagnostic and antibody, and yet, without any clear, coordinated strategy for how to best achieve that.

And not only has the president repeatedly lied about the availability of our tests, he's still fucking doing it.

Right now, he's saying that our testing capacity is sufficient to reopen the country, which remember, according to experts, it isn't.

We're doing around 200,000 tests a day when we likely need millions.

And yet on Tuesday, the president insisted that we were actually just about there.

Needs 5000000 tests per day by June in order to safely reopen.

You unveiled a plan yesterday that will increase testing, but not by that much.

Why not, and can you get to that benchmark?

Well, it will increase it, and it'll increase it by much more than that in the very near future.

you saying you're confident you can surpass 5000000 tests per day?

Oh, well, we're gonna be there very soon.

If you look at the numbers, it could be that we're getting very close.

And that is a lie that he's gonna get instantly caught on.

It's like someone claiming that they have a 10-inch penis immediately before taking off their underwear.

Okay, that's an undeniably impressive claim, but if you're lying, I'm gonna be very disappointed and a little angry that you thought I wouldn't notice.

And sure enough, that very day, Trump's assistant secretary of health told reporters, there is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day or even 5000000 tests a day.

And look, Some confusion is inevitable when a new disease starts spreading its way around the world.

And it's not like rolling out testing on this kind of scale was ever gonna be easy.

But again and again, the people in charge failed to prepare for the worst case scenario and have been slow in fixing mistakes.

All of which means, in May, we are still playing catch-up in the middle of a pandemic, which in turn, means thousands upon thousands of people dying preventable deaths.

So if this is a great success story for anyone, it's for the fucking coronavirus.

We need to scale up tests massively and right away.

Because if we want to return to the world that we're used to, 1 with sports, restaurants, hugs, and turning down party invitations because it's raining and not because you might die, testing is how we get there.

And that is a message that should really unite everyone in this country, from the people at home worried about the potential loss of life, to the people out protesting social distancing because they think it's too high a price to pay, to Alex Jones preparing to barbecue his neighbors.

We could all stand to listen to the advice of 1 of our bravest, brightest stars.

Testing, testing, testing, testing, testing, testing!

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Coronavirus VI: Testing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)