The Inanity of COVID-19 Testing

No wonder Europe disinvited the US from summering in the Mediterranean.

The times are getting stranger and stranger, but there is something cold and, frankly, terrifying about living in a moment in the United States where getting tested for a contagious virus has become not only politicized, but also increasingly fraught and complicated.

With the nonstop COVID-19 coverage interrupted by nonstop coverage of endemic, institutional racism in the US, it’s easy to forget that we are in a public health crisis. It becomes downright forgettable when minimizing a pandemic becomes a partisan rallying cry for the President of the United States and his followers.

The rhetoric coming from Mr. Trump, supported by his protectors in his administration and Congress and underscored by his allies at the state and local level, doesn’t apply to him or anyone in his cohort (wealthy, powerful, mostly white, and male), but it has deleterious effects on the country, you know, the one frequently referred to but infrequently considered.

When Mr. Trump refers to COVID-19 testing as a “double-edged sword” because “by having more tests, we have more cases,” and therefore has exhorted to his people to “slow the testing down, please,” it is not a joke. It is not sarcasm. It is a directive that has…