well, there is legislation moving through our general assembly that in fact says, absolutely. schools must be open five days a week. that in fact, virtual learning is a tool of last resort. right now, we need to get our kids back in school. i also think there s a tremendous opportunity for us to revise the protocols that we are using when a child is exposed but showing no symptoms in school. an incredibly important tool for us. the challenge we have is we don t have enough testing kits. here we are in january dealing with a surge and we don t have enough testing kits. we are doing everything we can within our department of health and human resources to expand testing capability to our school spirit also to those areas where we have virginians that are most vulnerable, and particularly the elderly. we should not see a testing problem right now.
making excuses. welcome to you both. ok, douglas, i ll start with you first. in the warning from the white house they are making the case that a lot of the bad news will be because of the highly transmissible omicron variant. here is jen psaki explaining. the month s job report may show losses in large part because workers were out sick from omicron at the point when it was peaking during the week when the data was taken. fair explanation or excuse, doug? well, clearly preparing for a bad report and correct as far as it goes. but you step back, the larger point is the administration inherited a strong economy, growing at 6.5%. spent trillions of dollars and tons of regulations and generating the economy that s not growing any faster and has bad inflation problem. meanwhile, during the same year, did they anticipate another surge in cases, no. did they get ahead of the testing problem, no. come with a plan for masks or
governors, we want to make sure our testing capacity is there. we want to make sure that we have access to the therapeutics, and that s where the federal government needs to step up. we need to make sure that there is a quick production. they need to rely upon the states for the distribution, and there is a lot of discussions about that. they need to improve that supply chain. let s take advantage of this going down to be better prepared around the corner. governor murphy, how do we not run into the testing problem we ran into pre-omicron? you have to preempt this clearly and we re now getting caught up as a country. thankfully our cases are going down in new jersey, new york, went down early on all of these waves. but i agree with governor hutchinson. we re not going to manage this to zero. we have to learn how to live with this. please, god, there is not another significant wave. every time you think you got this thing figured out, it humbles you. you decided to make the booste
onto a continued delta variant. no question that we have a testing problem in the united states. we have been talking about testing since march of 2020, and we have not gotten ahead of the curve and that s really not great news at this point in time. um, so people are making up their own rules. we re also i live in a part of the country where every step that the public officials take at the state level, our democratic governor has taken to try and put masking protocol in place, put vaccination requirements in place, has been undone by the legislature. so, it s a kind of free for all about what are the rules? what are the protocol? what are the and i think president biden is trying to walk through this minefield of having major portions of the country that have undone any of the basic public health
no question that we have a testing problem in the united states. we have been talking about testing since march of 2020, and we have not gotten ahead of the curve and that s really not great news at this point in time. um, so people are making up their own rules. we re also i live in a part of the country where every step that the public officials take at the state level, our democratic governor has taken to try and put masking protocol in place, put vaccination requirements in place, has been undone by the legislature. so, it s a kind of free for all about what are the rules? what are the protocol? what are the and i think president biden is trying to walk through this minefield of having major portions of the country that have undone any of the basic public health guidelines. and are finding themselves in a