This afternoon, Sen. Mark Warner held a digital town hall on Facebook (see video, below) to discuss COVID-19, “what he has been doing in the Senate to protect Virginians during the outbreak,” etc. Check it out, below. Among other things, Sen. Warner said he’s “particularly frustrated” about two areas:
- “Why our country has not joined with other industrial nations around the world – Germany, South Korea, Taiwan – and didn’t adopt a definitive testing standard as early as January. We are still way behind the rest of of much of the world on testing…There’s some good news happening in the testing field, more tests are coming on, and I’ve been very disappointed that there’s not been a single federal site where we can find the data on how many tests are being given in every state, in every county, what type of tests, what’s coming on board soon, what’s the capacity.”
- “Another area is PPE. In this area, I think the administration has been a total disaster. The fact that they have, instead of taking the federal powers that were granted to the president under the Defense Production Act and having in a sense a common spreadsheet that would show all of the PPE sources around the country or from abroad that are coming into our country and then allocate them in a right away, we almost have this Lord of the Flies, dog-eat-dog kind of approach…one state against another, one hospital system against another hospital system…”
Sen. Warner also commented on the news that he agreed to be part of a bipartisan group of Senators to work on ideas for reopening the economy. According to Sen. Warner, he is “only going to participate if this is a meaningful way to provide input and if the president moves forward on opening the economy based upon data, science, medical professionals…If we open up a community too early and lose the public’s trust that people can go out safely, that chance to reopen becomes much much harder down the line.”
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