Trump Assures Nation Anyone Who Wants A Coronavirus Test Can Get One, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Americans Might Learn How Many Of Them Were Sick

ATLANTA. President Donald J. Trump toured the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday wearing a red campaign hat and assured the American people that "anybody that wants a test can get a test," a guarantee that hospital administrators, state health officials, and the many Americans who could not get a test would spend the ensuing weeks gently contradicting.

The President offered the reassurance at a moment when the United States had tested only a few thousand people for the novel coronavirus, a shortfall caused in part by the faulty diagnostic kits the very agency standing behind him had shipped to state laboratories weeks earlier. Officials at the CDC, the President noted, had been impressed by how much he personally understood about the matter.

"Maybe I have a natural ability," Mr. Trump said, allowing that he might have made a capable scientist had the presidency not intervened. "Every one of these doctors said, how do you know so much about this." The doctors, several of whom were standing within earshot, did not at that moment elaborate.

Turning to the Grand Princess cruise ship, then idling off the coast of California with infected passengers aboard, the President explained that he would prefer the passengers remain on the vessel rather than disembark onto American soil, where they would be counted. "I like the numbers being where they are," he said. "I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault." The remark established, as a matter of stated preference, that the national case count was best managed by the federal government declining to learn it.

Later the same day, the President signed an $8.3 billion emergency funding bill to combat an outbreak his administration had spent the preceding weeks describing as contained, nearly gone, and likely to disappear one day like a miracle. A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the testing shortfall was being addressed rapidly and that the situation was, in every measurable respect, totally under control.

At press time, the President had identified the country's steadily rising case count as further proof of how much testing the United States was doing.