[Pages S2446-S2447]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

CORONAVIRUS

Mr. ENZI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in
the Congressional Record Senator Alexander's opening statement that he
delivered yesterday at the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor
and Pensions.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

COVID-19: Safely Getting Back to Work and Back to School

Mr. Alexander. The Committee on HELP will please come to
order. First, some administrative matters based on the advice
of the Attending Physician and the Sergeant at Arms after
consulting with the Department of Health and Human Services
and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Individuals in the hearing room are seated 6 feet apart. As
a result, there is no room for the public to attend in
person. Representatives of the press are working as a pool to
relay their observations to colleagues. The hearing may be
watched live on-line. An unedited recording will be available
on the Committee's website--<a href='http://www.help.senate.gov.
'>www.help.senate.gov.
</a> Witnesses are participating by videoconference in a one-
time exception. Some senators, including the chairman, are
participating by videoconference. Senators may remove their
masks to talk into the microphone since they are all six feet
apart. I am grateful to the Rules Committee, Sergeant at
Arms, the press gallery, the Architect of the Capitol, the
Capitol Police, and our committee staff, Chung Shek and Evan
Griffis, for all of their hard work to help keep all of us
safe.
At our hearing last Thursday, I said that all roads back to
work and back to school lead through testing and that what
our country has done so far on testing so far is ``impressive
but not nearly enough.'' Over the weekend, Sen. Schumer, the
Democrat leader, was nice enough to put out a tweet quoting
half of what I said. He left out the other half, the
``impressive'' part. So let me say it again in more specific
terms.
When I said ``impressive,'' I meant that, according to
Johns Hopkins University, the United States has tested over 9
million Americans for COVID-19. That is twice as many as any
other country--we don't know what China has done--and more
per capita than most countries including South Korea, which
several committee members have cited as an example of a
country doing testing well.
According to Dr. Deborah Birx, the U.S. will double its
testing during the month of May and be able to do at least 10
million tests per month. Here is what ``impressive'' means in
Tennessee: First, anyone who is sick, or a first responder or
a health care worker can get tested. Next, Governor Bill Lee
is also testing every prisoner, every resident and staff
member of a nursing home, offered weekend drive-thru testing,
and has done specific outreach to increase testing in low
income neighborhoods. A Tennessean can get a free test and a
free mask at the local public health clinic. The governor's
slogan is: ``If in doubt, get a test.''
Gov. Lee sent his testing goals for May to the federal
government, as every state has done. The federal government
will help make sure the state has the supplies it needs if
the labs and hospitals in our state have trouble getting them
through the usual commercial

[[Page S2447]]

channels. Tennessee has tested 4 percent of its population.
The governor hopes to increase that to 7 percent by the end
of May. That impressive level of testing is sufficient to
begin phase I of going back to work in Tennessee, but as I
said last week, it is not nearly enough to provide confidence
to 31,000 students and faculty that it is safe to return to
the University of Tennessee Knoxville campus in August.
Last week I talked with UT Knoxville Chancellor Donde
Plowman about what might persuade UT students and 20 million
other college students or parents of 50 million k-12 students
that it is safe to leave their homes and return to 5,000
college campuses and 100,000 public schools in August. That
is where the new shark tank, or RAD X, at the National
Institutes of Health that we heard about at our hearing last
Thursday comes in. Swimming around in that shark tank are
dozens of early stage proposals for new ways to create
diagnostic tests.
Three weeks ago, Congress gave NIH $1.5 billion to create a
competitive environment in which Dr. Francis Collins, the
distinguished scientist who directs NIH, can search for a few
new ideas that can create millions more tests by August and
even millions more by the Fall flu season. Congress gave
BARDA another $1 billion to coordinate the manufacture and
scaling up rapidly simple tests with quick results.
For example, the FDA authorized last week its first
diagnostic test using saliva a person provides at home
instead of a nose swab or blood. It authorized its first
antigen test, like the ones used for flu or strep throat,
which involves swabbing the inside of a nose to produce a
result in a few minutes.
Another proposal, not yet approved, is to put in your mouth
a sort of lollipop that is a sponge, take a photograph of the
lollipop with your cell phone and transmit it to a
laboratory. If it lights up, you will know you test positive.
Or the university might send students' saliva to a gene
sequencing laboratory, which can process thousands of these
in one night and report to the university the next day. In
all of these cases, if anyone tests positive, that student or
faculty member will be asked to self-isolate for two weeks,
and the rest of the student body can continue their
education. The same screening test might be repeated in two
or four weeks. That same process could occur at a middle
school or factory or in advance of/for players in a sporting
event.
Of course, anyone testing negative one day could test
positive the next. But such widespread screening of entire
campuses, schools or places of work would help to identify
those who are sick and to track down and quarantine those who
are exposed. That in turn, should help to persuade parents
and students that it is safe to leave home and go back to
school.
In addition to more testing by August, I expect Dr. Fauci
to tell us about additional treatments available to reduce
the risk of death from COVID-19 and about the
administration's plan to do something never done before by
this country--start mass manufacturing a vaccine before you
know for sure that it works.
Vaccines and treatments are the ultimate solutions. But
until we have them, all roads back to work and back to school
go through testing. The more tests we conduct, the better we
can identify the small number of those who are sick and track
those who they have had contact with. Then we can quarantine
the sick and exposed instead of trying to quarantine the
entire country with disastrous effects on our economic
wellbeing. This will require millions more new tests, many of
them new technologies. Some of these will fail. But we only
need a few successes to create millions more tests.
That is why I said last Thursday that what our country has
done so far in testing is impressive, but not nearly enough.
First, squeeze all the extra tests out of current
technologies. But then create new technologies to produce
millions more tests to identify and isolate those who are
sick and persuade the rest of us it is safe to go back to
work and back to school.
This is a bipartisan oversight hearing to examine how well
we are preparing the country to go safely back to work and to
school and to determine what more we need to do. Such an
exercise sometimes encourages finger pointing. Who did what
wrong? Before we spend too much time finger pointing, I would
like to suggest that almost all of us--the United States and
every country--underestimated this virus. Underestimated how
contagious it would be. How it can travel silently without
causing symptoms. How it can be especially deadly among
certain segments of the population, including the elderly,
those with pre-existing conditions, and minority populations.
At the committee's March 3 hearing on coronavirus--six
weeks after the first case had arrived in this country, when
there were only two deaths in the US from coronavirus--I read
this paragraph from the front page of the March 1 Sunday New
York Times: Much about the coronavirus remains unclear, and
it is far from certain that the outbreak will reach severe
proportions in the United States or affect many regions at
once. With its top-notch scientists, modern hospitals and
sprawling public health infrastructure, most experts agree,
the United States is among the countries best prepared to
prevent or manage such an epidemic.
A lot of effort has gone into trying to make the United
States among the best prepared nations. Over 20 years, the
last four Presidents and several Congresses--in response to
9/11, bird flu, Katrina, SARS, H1N1, MERS, and Ebola--passed
9 significant laws that created or contributed to the public
health preparedness and response framework we have today.
These 9 laws stood up the Strategic National Stockpile,
created an assistant secretary for preparedness and response,
provided incentives for the development and manufacturing of
diagnostics, vaccines, and medicines, strengthened the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and created the
Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority
(BARDA). Thanks to the leadership of Sen. Blunt and Sen.
Murray, Congress increased funding to the National Institutes
of Health for five straight years.
All of this was part of a shared goal--Democrats and
Republicans, Congresses and four Presidents--to advance our
ability to respond to public health threats, whether known,
like anthrax, or emerging, like COVID-19, and they
incorporated lessons learned from public health emergencies
at the time. But despite all that effort, even the experts
underestimated COVID-19.
This hearing is about how we improve our response now and
in the fall when this virus is expected to return. During our
oversight hearing today and future hearings, I also intend to
focus on the next pandemic: What can we learn from this one
to be ready for the next one, which will surely come? Can we
learn from the current fast tracking of tests, treatments and
vaccines how to make them available even more rapidly next
time? How to keep hospitals and states from selling off masks
and other protective equipment in between crises because of
tight budgets. How to make sure Congress funds our share of
the responsibility? How to provide enough extra hospital beds
without canceling elective surgeries, hurting other patients
and bankrupting hospitals. Whose job should it be to
coordinate supply lines so that protective equipment,
supplies, and medicines are available and delivered to where
they need to be, when they are needed? How can the stockpile
be managed better and what should be in it?
My preacher once said: ``I'm not worried about you on
Sunday, it's what you do during the rest of the week.'' I'm
afraid that during the rest of the week--between pandemics--
we relax our focus on preparedness. We become preoccupied
with other important things. Our collective memory is short.
Just three months ago the country was consumed with
impeaching a President. Now that seems like ancient Roman
history. Now, while this crisis has our full attention, I
believe we should put into law this year whatever
improvements we need to be well prepared for the next one. If
there is to be finger pointing, I hope fingers will point in
that direction.
We are fortunate today to have four distinguished witnesses
who are at the heart of the response to the coronavirus
crisis. I have asked each to summarize his remarks in five
minutes. Then we will have a five minute round of questions.
I have agreed that we will end our hearing at 12:30, which
will permit one full round of questions. Sen. Murray will
have the opportunity to ask an additional question before we
close and all senators will be able to submit questions for
the record. There will be other hearings to follow last
Thursday's hearing on testing and this one.
Staying at home indefinitely is not the way to end this
pandemic. There is not enough money available to help all
those hurt by a closed economy. All roads back to work and
back to school lead through testing, tracking, isolation,
treatment, and vaccines. This requires widespread testing--
millions more tests created mostly by new technologies--to
identify those who are sick and who have been exposed so they
can be quarantined and, by containing the disease in this
way, give the rest of America enough confidence to leave
their homes. For the near term, to help make sure those
31,000 UT students and faculty show up in August, we need
widespread testing--millions more tests created mostly by new
technologies--to identify those who are sick and who have
been exposed so they can be quarantined and, by containing
the disease in this way, give the rest of America enough
confidence to go back to work and back to school.

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