“Emergency orders I’m issuing today will also confer broad new authority to the secretary of health and human services. The secretary of H.H.S. will be able to immediately waive provisions of applicable laws and regulations to give doctors and all hospitals and health care providers maximum flexibility to respond to the virus and care for patients.
“This includes the following critical authorities — the ability to waive laws to enable telehealth, a fairly new and incredible thing that’s happened in the not-so-distant past. I tell you, what they’ve done with telehealth is incredible. It gives remote doctors visits and hospital check-ins the power to waive certain federal license requirements so that doctors from other states can provide services and states with the greatest need.
“No. 2, the ability to waive requirements that critical-access hospitals limit the number of beds to 25, and the length of stay to 96 hours. The ability to waive the requirements of a three-day hospital stay prior to admission to a nursing home, big thing. The authority to waive rules to hinder hospitals’ ability to bring additional physicians on board or obtain needed office space. They can do as they want. They could do what they have to do. They know what they have to do. Now they don’t have any problem getting it done.
“The authority to waive rules that severely restrict what hospitals could care for patients within the hospital itself, ensuring that the emergency capacity could be quickly established. We’ll remove or eliminate every obstacle necessary to deliver our people the care that they need and that they’re entitled to. No resource will be spared, nothing whatsoever. Ten days ago, I brought together the C.E.O.s of commercial labs at the White House and directed them to immediately begin working on a solution to dramatically increase the availability of tests.
“Other countries have called us and worked with us, and they’re doing similar things or will be doing similar things. As a result of that action today we’re announcing a new partnership with private sector to vastly increase and accelerate our capacity to test for the coronavirus. We want to make sure that those who need a test could get a test very safely, quickly and conveniently, but we don’t want people to take a test if — if we feel that they shouldn’t be doing it. And we don’t want everyone running out and taking — only have if you have certain symptoms.
“Using federal emergency authorities, the F.D.A. approved a new test for the virus. We did this within hours after receiving the application from Roche, a process that would normally take weeks. We therefore expect up to half a million additional tests will be available early next week. We’ll be announcing locations probably on Sunday night.
“I want to thank Roche, great company, for their incredible work. I would also like to thank Thermo Fisher. The F.D.A.’s goal is to hopefully authorize the application within 24 hours. It is going very quickly, which will bring additionally 1.4 million tests on board next week and five million within a month. I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.