The president, in demanding a return to class and to college football, makes education and collegiate sports the last area of American life to be tainted by his false narratives about the pandemic. Almost all of his assurances about the crisis – which have tended to minimize the impact and ignore science – have been proven wrong.
But nearly six months into America’s fight the pandemic, the country has a whopping a quarter of every 20 million coronavirus cases in the world. Thousands of Americans die every week and there are alarming new signs of further spread of the disease in the Midwest, California, Texas and some northeastern cities, even if there are some limited signs of encouragement, for example in lower infections in Florida.
Yet Trump did what he always did Monday, identifying a preferred outcome – opening schools and playing college sports – without providing evidence that it was safe in a virus-bedded nation if a plan became normal again.
Instead, he paints a pink, fantastic perception that the nightmare alone is over.
“At the end of a fairly short period of time, you will be in very, very good shape in our whole country,” he said in a heated briefing that statistics on cherry-picking were full of misinformation and nonsensical arguments.
Study allows 100K children to be infected in two weeks
Problems with returning to school and meetings of collegiate football corps that could lead to the cancellation of the season will further fracture the president’s attempts to convince voters that he has led the way out of the viral storm. They will also limit his efforts to distract from his abuse of the pandemic that has suppressed his approval ratings less than three months before asking voters for a second term.
Many U.S. school districts and colleges across the country have the president’s advice to reopen and are starting semesters online, raising the prospect of many months more home for school children, thanks to growing concerns among parents.
Asked about the study, Trump reiterated that because most children did not become seriously ill, it was okay to open schools and without proof said that children do not transmit the virus to other people.
“It’s a small fraction of the dead, a small fraction and they’re getting better fast,” Trump said in the White House Briefing Room.
“They may have it for a short period of time. For the most part, they do it very well. According to the people I’ve talked to, they do not transport it or they do not transport it easily to other people. I think schools should “It’s a very important thing for the economy to get schools up and running,” he said.
But Dr. Leana Wen, a CNN medical analyst and doctor of an emergency room at George Washington University Hospital, said the study showed that it would be impossible to safely open schools in districts where the virus was not well suppressed.
“Imagine these 97,000 kids were all in school. Imagine how many outbreaks there could be,” Wen told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin. “The lesson to be learned here is that you can not protect a school from coronavirus if the community is a hotbed of infection. There is simply no way.”
There are already signs, in the minority of schools and districts already embarking on personal learning, of problems ahead.
The cases do not necessarily make an iron-clad case for keeping all schools close for the months and even years it can take to catch the virus. Elders are desperate for children to go back to school. The prolonged closures have had a devastating educational and psychological impact on the children of America. Many low-income students rely on schools for their only nutritious meal. And Trump is right in the sense that the economy cannot fully recover if millions of parents miss childcare with schools still in place.
But the early problems of returning to classes show that arrangements are often chaotic and expose the lack of a nationwide approach to school children that Trump and his government could have overseen if they were serious about government. The CDC issued national guidelines for safe schooling – but they were heavily criticized as being too draconian by the president.
Trump pushes for season football
But the loss of big-time college football would deal another devastating blow to Trump’s claims that regular life is returning or that the pandemic is surviving.
College athletes are by definition students and are harder to quarantine as professional athletes pay high salaries for their problems. Two major pro sports, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, have successfully launched their enduring seasons in bio-protected “bubbles” in Florida and Canada, respectively. But Major League Baseball had to cancel multiple games to ballplayers – traveling from series to series in the traditional way testing positive for Covid-19. A bubble for college football, with its enormous teams and coaching entourages, is impractical and it is almost inconceivable how the season can go in all recognizable even in empty stadiums.
“The student-athletes have worked too hard for their season to cancel. #WeWantToPlay,” Trump tweeted on Monday afternoon.
In fact, if the college season does not continue, Trump’s failure as president will launch an effective campaign against the pandemic – including saturation testing and tracing and his opposition to drastic measures to stop the spread of the disease – will be a major reason why.
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