Important
news from this week:
-
This week, I chaired a hearing in the Senate health committee with key
administration officials and COVID-19 task force members to explore what
federal, state and local governments need to do to get Americans back
work and back to school. You can read more about that hearing
below.
- The U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services announced Tennessee will receive more than $155
million to support COVID-19 testing and contact
tracing across the state. Tennessee has done more testing than most states,
but even more testing is key to ensuring folks are safe as they go
back to work and back to school. When in doubt, get a
test!
- Residents of Davidson, Putnam and Wilson
counties who missed the May 4th deadline to register for Federal
Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster assistance can
still apply. Residents have 60 days after the deadline
to apply and must provide justification for late
registration.
COVID-19 testing in the United States is
impressive – enough to begin going back to work
This week, I chaired a
hearing in the Senate health committee on what federal, state and local
governments are doing to help Americans go back to work and back to school
as rapidly and safely as possible. All roads back to work and school
lead through testing. According to Johns Hopkins University, the
United States has tested over 10 million Americans for COVID-19. That is
twice as many as any other country 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.
Here is what impressive means in Tennessee: First,
anyone who is sick, a first responder, or a health care worker can get
tested. Governor Bill Lee is also testing every prisoner, as well as
every resident and staff member of nursing homes. He has also 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. Tennessee has so far
tested four percent of its population, and the governor hopes to
increase that to seven percent by the end of May.
That amount 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.
That is where the new
“Shark Tank” at the National Institutes of
Health I worked to provide funding for comes in to play. 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. 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.
Swimming around in that shark tank are dozens of early stage proposals
for new ways to create diagnostic tests. Some of these will fail. But
we only need a few successes to create millions of more
tests.
Tennessee
students need to return in the Fall
This week, I joined National Public Radio (NPR) to
discuss efforts to ramp up COVID-19 testing to allow students to go back
to school this fall. You can listen to this interview here. If I were president of the University of Tennessee,
I would say we’re going back to school this fall. The only
questions is, how do we do it safely? That may take a number of changes.
There are 100,000 public schools with 50 million
children, and 6,000 colleges with 20 million students. We have to think about the impact on those
children of not going to school for a year. I think part of our leadership
responsibility is to not just throw up our hands and say, “No, we
can't do it.” Instead, we are going to need a strategy for going
back to school and to college that is safe.
#TennesseeStrong – Tennesseans fighting back against
COVID-19
Here are some inspiring stories
from this week of Tennesseans who are showing their “Volunteer
Spirit” and supporting their communities:
- A Nashville entrepreneur volunteered to fly to Macon, Georgia to pick up COVID-19
testing samples and bring them back to Tennessee – speeding up results
for those who were tested by several days.
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working with other
national labs, is continuing to use their resources and brainpower to
help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more about all of the great
work they are doing here.
Here are a few interviews
where I discussed the United States’ efforts to ramp up COVID-19
testing so we can go back to work and back to school state by
state.
Fox News – America’s
Newsroom
WKRN-ABC Nashville Channel
2
WREG – CBS Memphis Channel
3
NBC News – Meet the Press
PBS – PBS NewsHour
Interest rates on new federal student loans will drop to
historic lows on July 1st
On July 1st, interest rates on new federal student loans
will drop to historic lows. This rate
drop is a result of Congress working together in 2013 with President
Obama to tie student loan rates to actual federal government borrowing
costs. And I plan to continue working together with my colleagues in
a similar bipartisan fashion this year to continue passing legislation
to help make college more worth student’s time and money. The
interest rate on undergraduate loans will be 2.75% for the 2020-2021
school year, down from 4.53% in the 2019-2020 school year. The interest
rate on loans for graduate students will be 4.3% (down from 6.08%) and
for PLUS loans for parents and graduates will be 5.3% (down from
7.08%).
How can the CARES
Act can help you?
I
encourage Tennesseans to visit my website to learn more about how you can take advantage of the
federal assistance Congress passed and President Trump signed into law that will keep
paychecks coming, relieve financial burdens and help contain COVID-19.
Below are a few
news articles from this week I thought you might want to
read:
NBC News: GOP Sen. Alexander says increased testing is
the 'only solution' for economic recovery
New York Times: A Spaniel, a
Mute Button and Profound Matters of State
WATE-ABC Knoxville Channel
6: Senate lawmakers hear testimony from top health experts on
nation’s pandemic response
Remember birthdays.
#245 in Lamar Alexander’s Little
Plaid Book
