President Trump held a conference call Monday with the nation's governors. Somebody gave a recording to CBS News.
If you have the audio, you may as well listen.
The CBS report of the conversation featured Montana Gov. Steve Bullock, a moderate Democrat who tried to run for president but couldn't get traction. He told Trump that, for all the appropriate attention paid to New York and other coronavirus hot spots, the nation faces a looming rural crisis in testing and medical supplies.
Bullock could have been talking about Arkansas when he complained of "four or five cases" in which Montana had made medical supply orders--for either testing kits or personal protective equipment--that were canceled by shippers because the federal government had intervened to override the orders and outbid the purchases to redirect the supplies to urgent needs.
Like Gov. Asa Hutchinson, as related in this space last week, Bullock complained that the current international market has small states competing both globally and with their own country and each other, and as a low-priority consumer as long as there are hotter immediate spots.
Bullock laid out a nightmare scenario by which states like Montana don't have enough kits to perform needed tests now, leaving them unable to predict intelligently an impending hospital caseload that could worsen quickly while those states continue to struggle to compete for protective equipment.
The answer is as simple and as complex as rapid domestic mass-manufacture of tests and protective equipment and smartly strategic central distribution run competently by the federal government.
The Trump administration seems to think it can make all this work without nationalizing the system and presumably offending a sacred conservative free-market principle.
Trump's response on the recording was, alas, typically lacking, if not utterly oblivious.
CBS quoted him saying, "I haven't heard about testing [as a problem] in weeks" and that the United States had tested more than any nation and had a new test coming out that would give instant results.
A public health official on the call gently amended the president's comment to explain that the federal government is purchasing for each state at least 15 recently approved test kits that can confirm a coronavirus diagnosis within four minutes. There are a dozen tests to a kit.
The president had perhaps overstated the imminent panacea.
Hutchinson told me the next day that Bullock had made his point, which he said he'd made himself several times and would make later that day when he got a returned call from Vice President Pence.
A private conversation with Pence might be more fruitful than a vast one with a preening president. Pence might be able to admit in a private conversation with a friendly governor that, yes, he might have heard something about problems with getting enough testing kits.
In the meantime, Hutchinson said: "While we have invested in testing equipment, we cannot run the tests with any efficiency without the testing kits or reagents. For example, for the UAMS testing machine, we got two kits on Monday, five kits on Tuesday and five kits on Saturday. So, you can see the limited number of tests that we can do without a better supply."
Hutchinson said the Health Department was conducting tests manually, which is laborious and takes days.
But none of that is as wild, Hutchinson said, as "the saga on ventilator acquisition and PPE purchases. It truly is a jungle out there in the marketplace."
Sellers are canceling deals if they get a higher price, which they can always find because there is a shortage and understandable fear.
A state's wire transfer for an international purchase might take three days. During those three days, New York, for example, might have an agent on the ground with cash. And no one can seriously begrudge New York's attention to its critical need.
Politico reports that the U.S. asked Thailand last week whether it had any spare medical supplies and that a confused Thailand said no, and that the U.S. currently had two ships Thailand-bound to deliver such supplies. A startled U.S. stopped the ships.
It now seems clear that Trump has been right about at least one thing. It's that the United States needs to be more self-sufficient in its manufacturing.
If we survive this pandemic and economic catastrophe, there ought to be money to be made producing goods domestically that the country shouldn't be dependent on others to produce and ship.
We should take two lessons from the coronavirus epidemic. One is that we are all in this world together, which means a germ in Asia is a germ in America.
The other is that, while we're all in this world together, there is still something to be said for taking care of our own.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 04/02/2020