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WASHINGTON – Elections and the pandemic are colliding in the United States, with the country registering its highest daily number of cases since the pandemic began on Friday.
Johns Hopkins University reported 83,757 new cases.
This comes as President Donald Trump increases the frequency of his rallies in critical states, including Florida, where on Friday a large crowd of his supporters gathered in the retirement community, The Villages, outdoors, but many were not wearing masks. .
Trump cast an early vote on Saturday (Oct. 24), ahead of the Nov. 3 vote, at a library that doubles as a polling station in West Palm Beach, Florida. “I voted for a guy named Trump,” he said with a smile as he left.
Separately, on Friday, his rival Joe Biden, who has been holding campaign events with smaller and more socially distanced audiences, delivered a speech on his strategy to control the pandemic, should he be elected president.
Biden’s strategy includes a mandate to wear face masks on at least federal property and interstate transportation across the country; intensification of testing and creation of a national body of contact tracers; and the use of the Defense Production Law to increase the production of personal protective equipment.
A Biden administration “would provide consistent, reliable, reliable and detailed nationwide technical support and guidance to safely reopen and the resources to make this happen,” he added.
But polls show that the pandemic is not a priority issue for Trump supporters, in particular, who care more about the economy.
At the national level, polls indicate that the economy, the composition of the Supreme Court bench, and health care are top issues.
A Pew research poll released Oct. 21 showed that the gap between supporters of the two rival camps on the significance of the pandemic has indeed widened since August.
The survey was conducted from October 6 to 12. About 74 percent of the 8,972 registered voters surveyed said the economy is a very important issue for their vote.
But there was a sharp decline in the proportion of Trump supporters calling the coronavirus “very important,” Pew said.
“About eight out of ten Biden supporters (82 percent) say the coronavirus will be very important to their vote, compared to just 24 percent of Trump supporters,” the report said.
“Since August, the proportion of Trump supporters who view the coronavirus as very important has decreased 15 percentage points. There has been no change among Biden supporters.”
A separate Gallup poll released Oct. 5 found that nearly nine out of 10 registered voters view presidential candidates’ positions on the economy as very or extremely important to their vote.
At least three-quarters of voters consider six other issues important. In descending order of importance are terrorism and national security, education, health care, crime, the coronavirus response, and race relations.
The proportion of voters who say the economy is extremely important increased from 30% to 45% between December and September, Gallup reported. The poll also pointed to a large 32-point gap between Democrats and Republicans, on the significance of the Covid-19 pandemic, with Democrats far more concerned than Republicans.
As an anecdote, based on multiple interviews in three states, Trump supporters interviewed by The Sunday Times generally believe that the president has done the best he could to handle the pandemic.
When asked about the increase in the number of cases across the country, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told MSNBC on Friday that the country was in a “precarious place.”
The United States needs to redouble fundamental public health measures like universal use of masks, physical distancing and avoiding crowds, particularly indoors, he said.
“They seem simple enough … but they really work,” he said. “You don’t want the extreme. You don’t want to say, close, what we don’t want to do, instead of just not worrying about it, just do what you want to do.”
But as President Trump despises him more and more, the leading expert now carries less weight. The White House is promoting the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial Oct. 16 statement by three public health experts from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, advocating that authorities lift lockdown restrictions on the young and healthy while concentrating protection in the elderly.
In an email on October 19, Ian Bremmer, president of The Eurasia Group, wrote: “The … Declaration of the Greater Barrington (is) a statement by a libertarian think tank intended to oppose the lockdowns and, in essence, support a herd immunity approach. “
“It further clarifies the dividing line, with one side of the political spectrum advocating to stop worrying about the pandemic and put the economy in order; the other argues that reducing the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths is the highest priority, and if that costs more economically in the short term, so be it ”.
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