White House coronavirus adviser calls for more Covid-19 testing after Trump talks of slowing down

Just days after President Trump said at a political rally he wanted to slow Covid-19 testing down — a comment that his aides later said was made in jest — Deborah Birx, who is helping lead the White House's coronavirus response, made a forceful case for continuing to build testing capacity. Speaking Monday to the American Society for Microbiology's virtual conference, Birx called for doing more testing so that it's not just about diagnosing cases, but about staying ahead of the virus as it moves through a community. With widespread surveillance testing, health authorities can get a signal of increasing spread if more tests are starting to come back positive — as has been the case in a number of states recently. "It's not going to work as a signal if we're not expanding tests into the communities so we can see those inflection points early," she said.