Warnings from medical experts that this weekend’s meetings could lead to even more disastrous infections than Memorial Day events mean this is not a time for national celebration.
While everyone can be encouraged that the unemployment rate dropped remarkably to 11.1% in June, news of the increase in cases and cities under siege that Trump dismissed could make Thursday’s data a false dawn. Bars, restaurants, and shops are closing again across the country, including California, which faces a protracted disaster, in a way that could once again increase job losses and quell the rebound that Trump is willing to inflate further of any connection to reality to boost your hopes for reelection.
Trump appeared to reporters just hours after the United States reached its worst daily new infection total of 51,174 on Wednesday. That record would only be held for 24 hours as the US broke its record again with 51,504 new cases reported Thursday night.
But the President had other records in mind.
“There has been nothing like this: a record. It has just been said that the United States economy added almost 5 million jobs in June, breaking all expectations,” the president sang. “Today’s announcement shows that our economy is rebounding.”
In what are becoming daily examples of breach of duty, the President massively misrepresented the state of the pandemic.
“The crisis is being managed … Some areas that were badly affected now are doing very well. Some were doing very well, and we think they might have gone off and erupted, and we are putting out the fires,” he said.
Terrible data
Disappointing data on the pandemic that poured in as a flurry on Thursday belied Trump’s assessment that the crisis is “being handled.”
Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, one of Trump’s most aggressive partners in pushing for rapid economic openness that challenged the guidelines of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, insists he will not close the economy despite his state hitting a new record of 10,000 new cases on Thursday. Texas came in with almost 8,000 more new cases, just a few fewer than its worst day ever on Wednesday. Arizona reported more than 3,000 new infections on Thursday after its worst day yet on Wednesday when it reported more than 4,800.
In a landmark move that broke the president’s resistance to the mandates, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican, said he would now require all Texans to wear a mask when they go out to the public if they were from counties where they had registered the most than 20 cases of coronavirus. Recorded. He showed charts of Texans showing breakneck infection rates, test positivity rates, and hospitalizations.
“These numbers reveal a very stark reality. Covid-19 is not going to go away. In fact, it is getting worse,” Abbott said.
Another member of Trump’s early-opening Republican gang of governors, Brian Kemp of Georgia, said people should “do the right thing” and wear a mask.
While Trump refuses to set an example by wearing one on camera, many experts hope things will get even worse.
“It has created a perfect storm: the combination of travel, the combination of reopening, perhaps in some cases, too soon, and the combination of people who do not necessarily follow some of these preventive guidelines,” said Dr. Joshua Barocas, a contagious disease doctor at Boston Medical Center, told the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Dr. Peter Hotez, an infectious disease specialist who heads the Baylor School of Tropical Medicine, warned that Texas, Arizona and Florida are close to entering “apocalyptic” territory in terms of new infections.
‘Incorrect on both fronts’
Even for a president who has a habit of framing reality to fit his political priorities, Trump’s comments on the economy on Thursday were dazzling and, in those circumstances, callous. But there were also flickering signs of anxiety in Trump’s bravado. At one point, he warned that if presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden won the presidency, there would be an economic collapse of proportions in 1929. Trump apparently failed to detect the irony that his denial that the pandemic would be a problem for the United States contributed to lack of preparation, which helped trigger the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Trump did not stay to answer questions about the virus, but left Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow to minimize the terrifying warnings from the government’s top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, of that the virus is emerging and could produce cases of 100,000 new infections per day.
“I think what Dr. Fauci said is that if people don’t take these things seriously, the numbers could continue to rise,” said Mnuchin.
Fauci, banished to UK radio, even as the US media pressured the White House to speak to the Americans, directly contradicted Trump.
“In the United States, even in the strictest blockades, only about 50% of the country was blocked, allowing the outbreak to perpetuate, which we never had under very good control,” Fauci told the BBC Radio 4 flagship. “Today” program.
“The problem we are facing now is the attempt to reopen or open the government and return it to some form of normalcy. We are seeing very disturbing peaks in different individual states in the United States,” he added.
Another senior government health official, Admiral Dr. Brett Giroir, cut a hole in another of Trump’s falsehoods: the claim that cases are only increasing because the United States is doing more tests for coronavirus.
“There is no doubt that the more evidence you get, the more you will discover, but we think this is a real increase in cases, because the positive percentage is going up. So this is a real increase in cases,” said Giroir. he told the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis on Thursday.
Biden accused Trump of wanting to get out of the crisis to focus on his reelection bid.
“Trump wants to declare that his health crisis is over and unemployment is resolved. Unfortunately, he is wrong on both fronts,” the former vice president said Thursday. Noting the number of lives lost, Biden added: “That is a direct consequence of Donald Trump’s failed leadership and a totally mismanaged crisis from the start.”
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