U.S. President Donald Trump traveled to Maine Friday to tour a facility that makes medical swabs used for coronavirus testing, but the swabs made during his visit will ultimately be thrown in the trash, the company said.
Puritan's marketing manager for the company told USA Today that the factory was in "limited" operation during the president's tour and "swabs produced during that time will be discarded."
It's unclear how many testing swabs will be thrown out, and why, though the move follows reports of test shortages during the Covid-19 crisis as states begin to reopen and need to expand their testing capacity, according to several media outlets in the U.S.
Workers in white lab coats, hair nets and plastic booties worked at machines making swabs while the president walked through the room. Trump, who did not wear a mask for the visit, stopped at one point to talk with some of the workers.
"When you have more tests, you have more cases. I say to my people: Every time we test, you find cases because we do more testing," he said during his Friday visit, adding "So if we have more cases — if we wanted to do testing in China or in India, or other places, I promise you, there'd be more cases. But we're doing a great job with the testing. And you’re doing a fantastic job in getting out the swabs."
While China's Wuhan - the hardest-hit city by the coronavirus and where the first known cases were reported last December - tested nearly 10 million people in an unprecedented 19-day campaign to check the entire city, which identified just 300 positive cases, all of which had no symptoms.
Trump has insisted that "anyone" in the U.S. is able to get tested, while his administration has recently accelerated production of tests as labs process as many as 400,000 tests a day. However, technicians and health officials have expressed concerns about a lack of nationwide consistent strategies and inconsistent results from a patchwork response to the pandemic.
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