President Donald Trump celebrated the decline in death rates in a series of weekend tweets.
“In a way, our tremendous success in the Tests gives the fake news media everything they want, CASES. Meanwhile, deaths and the top death rate decrease,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany touted the lower death rates on Monday as a sign of success.
“This president takes Covid seriously, but we must take into account the death rate and how well we are doing against the rest of the world,” McEnany told Fox News.
The administration’s rejection came as American medical organizations urged the public to wear masks and physically distance themselves as coronavirus cases increase.
“That is why as doctors, nurses, leaders of hospitals and health systems, researchers and public health experts, we are urging the American public to take the simple steps that we know will help stop the spread of the virus: wearing a face mask. , keep physical distance and hand washing, ”said the letter, signed by the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association.
“We are not powerless in this public health crisis, and we can overcome it in the same way that we defeat previous threats to public health, by allowing science and evidence to shape our decisions and inform our actions,” the organizations wrote.
Meanwhile, local officials in states with growing cases were quick to deal with mounting pressure on hospitals.
In Miami-Dade County, Florida, Mayor Carlos Giménez signed an emergency order Monday to close gyms, party rooms, and dance halls, and only allows restaurants to operate takeout and delivery services.
Florida has recorded a total of 200,111 coronavirus cases and 3,832 deaths as of July 5, according to data from the COVID Monitoring Project.
The city’s hospitals are almost full, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez told CNN on Monday.
“When we opened, people started socializing as if the coronavirus did not exist, and I think they forgot how incredibly efficient the spread of the coronavirus is and how incredibly efficient it is spreading,” Suarez said.
Suarez asked for a national mask mandate and said it was no different than requiring the use of a seat belt. Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber echoed that sentiment and pleaded with the president to set an example by representing the use of masks as a show of strength.
“That would help a lot because right now people are looking for a message that is the path of least resistance,” Gelber told CNN. “And when the President of the United States gives them a path of least resistance, they are taking it and they are killing people right now.”
Politicians in Texas, another coronavirus hot spot, also pushed for mask mandates and disputed Trump’s claims that the evidence is largely responsible for the increase in cases.
“We have been increasing testing for a long time and a key indicator of the fact that it is not testing is the fact that our positivity rate has skyrocketed,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg told MSNBC, and He added that he supports a mask mandate at the national level. “What this is is a very fast, too fast opening of the Texas economy.”
