Kathy Griffin is calling out President Trump over a lack of COVID-19 test kits from an isolation ward where she says she's battling "UNBEARABLY PAINFUL symptoms." The 59-year-old comedian on Wednesday shared a selfie showing her wearing a mask in a hospital bed. "He's lying," she wrote in response to a tweet from Trump, who claimed that the US "has done far more 'testing' than any other nation, by far!" Despite her symptoms, Griffin said she couldn't be tested for COVID-19 because of "CDC (Pence task force) restrictions," per People. (The CDC says clinicians should "use their judgment" to determine whether a patient should be tested.) She said she had therefore been moved to the "isolation ward room a major hospital ER from a separate urgent care facility."
The CDC distributed 200 test kits—each allowing for testing of 300 to 400 people—to all 50 states in early February. Even if the tests hadn't been flawed, hard-hit areas hadn't received enough. "Public health officials are just beginning to grapple with the fallout from that early bungling of testing, which is likely to haunt the country in the months to come," reports Kaiser Health News. Testing is indeed ramping up—with 65,497 positive tests out of 484,062 completed, according to COVID Tracking Project. But while Trump's tweet claimed the US does more testing in eight days than South Korea does over eight weeks, the US population is more than six times that of South Korea's and "on a per capita basis, South Korea is testing far more of its citizens than the US," per USA Today. (More Kathy Griffin stories.)
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