UPDATE - Trump: Large-scale coronavirus testing ready to go

ADDS DETAILS THROUGHOUT

By Vakkas Dogantekin and Beyza Binnur Donmez

ANKARA (AA) - Under fire for a poor response to coronavirus, U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said his administration is now ready to start mass public testing.

"The changes have been made and testing will soon happen on a very large scale basis. All Red Tape has been cut, ready to go!" he tweeted following criticism over a testing kit shortage and a tepid response to his attempts to reassure the public.

Trying to pass the buck, Trump sought to blame the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the nation's leading public health institution, for failing to tackle the testing kit problem over the years.

"For decades the @CDCgov looked at, and studied, its testing system, but did nothing about it. It would always be inadequate and slow for a large scale pandemic, but a pandemic would never happen, they hoped," Trump said.

Trump then turned to one of his favorite targets, former President Barack Obama, accusing him of exacerbating the situation.

"President Obama made changes that only complicated things further. Their response to H1N1 Swine Flu was a full scale disaster, with thousands dying, and nothing meaningful done to fix the testing problem, until now," he said.

Earlier in the day, the president praised his administration's response to the virus and slammed the efforts of Democratic nominee for 2020 elections, Joe Biden, when he was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic.

"Sleepy Joe Biden was in charge of the H1N1 Swine Flu epidemic which killed thousands of people. The response was one of the worst on record. Our response is one of the best, with fast action of border closings & a 78% Approval Rating, the highest on record. His was lowest!" Trump tweeted.

Ronald Klain, a lawyer who served as a senior White House aide to Obama and headed Obama's pandemic response, criticized Trump's comments, claiming the president failed to test people during the outbreak.

"Facts: The Obama administration tested 1 million people for H1N1 in the first month after the first U.S. diagnosed case. The first U.S. coronavirus case was 50+ days ago. And we haven't even tested 10,000 people yet," Klain responded.

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Science Journalist Laurie Garett said Thursday the Trump administration made "a big mistake" by obliterating the entire infrastructure of pandemic response that the Obama administration had created.

Speaking to American daily TV show Democracy Now, Garett claimed that Trump did not do it because of money because due to it was not t a heavily funded program, but because it was Obama's program.

The Trump administration has been blasted for the unavailability of test kits, with several states saying federal authorities should allow them to develop their own test kits.

- FDA grants emergency approval to speed up COVID-19 test

Meanwhile, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted Roche Holding AG, a Swiss multinational healthcare company, an "emergency use authorization" for coronavirus test, which may increase testing tenfold, according to Bloomberg News.

The authorization came for Roche's Cobas 6800 and 8800 systems which can test 1,440 and 4,128 patients a day in order.

"We are increasing the speed definitely by a factor of 10," Thomas Schinecker, head of Roche’s diagnostics unit, told Bloomberg.

The two systems can provide coronavirus test results within four hours, according to the company.

Almost 30 U.S. states have declared a state of emergency due to the outbreak, which nationally has killed 37 and infected over 1,700.

So far, almost every state has at least one reported case.

Globally, the death toll is now over 4,900, with more than 134,000 confirmed cases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), which has declared the outbreak a pandemic.