What matters: the surgeon general begs you to wear a mask. Trump finally accepts

07/21/2020 Health


“I beg your viewers. I beg you,” Jerome Adams said during the appearance before the conservative audience on “Fox & Friends.”

“Please understand that we are not trying to take away your liberties when we say, ‘Wear a face covering.'”

So why isn’t a face mask required? “If you’re going to have a federal mandate, you have to have a federal enforcement mechanism, and now as a scientist and educator, I’d rather help people understand why they should cooperate with wearing a mask and how they benefit from it, rather than simply simply saying that we will force it to do so, particularly by sending federal troops or using federal mechanisms, “Adams said.

The pivot. Later, President Donald Trump tweeted a photograph of himself wearing a mask, calling it “patriotic.”
Here is everything mask recommendation history.
Here is a list of all states that now require masks in public.
50% reduction: “People need to know that wearing masks can reduce virus transmission by up to 50%, and those who refuse are putting their lives, their families, their friends and their communities at risk,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, director from The University of Washington Institute for Health Measurement and Assessment, told Holly Yan of CNN.

Horrible, sickly irony. Trump and other leaders did not lead the way in the US by encouraging face masks, even after it was clear that they helped stop the spread of Covid in part because they wanted to focus on reopening the country.

Now, as the Washington Post points out, countries that focused on masks are in a stronger position to reopen, albeit still with masks, and the United States is on more travel restriction lists and more parts of the country may be. have to go back to stricter restrictions on daily life.

Admitting there is a problem

Clearly there is a new line from the White House and federal officials.

Trump used to deny that there was a problem. Now he’s admitting to a “big outbreak in Florida, Texas, and a couple of other places.”

Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Admiral Brett Giroir, said on CNN on Monday: “There is no doubt that we are having an increase right now.”

That has been clear for weeks on the continuing high number of positive tests.

It is clear from the increasing number of hospitalizations in many states, such as Mississippi, where the governor said on CNN Sunday that the number of Covid-19 patients needing hospital care has doubled in two weeks.

Growth is actually in most of the country, according to the CNN report. As of Monday morning, 31 states have seen more new cases in the past week compared to new cases in the previous week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

Read this set of bullets in a story by CNN’s Christina Maxouris and Holly Yan. What follows the weeks of increased infection? Overwhelmed hospitals.
  • Los Angeles reported its highest number of Covid-19 hospitalizations in one day, with at least 2,216 people hospitalized. And more than half of the 2,848 new cases reported Sunday were among people under the age of 41, authorities said.
  • In Florida, at least 49 hospitals had no more ICU space available on Sunday, according to data from the Florida Health Care Administration Agency.
  • Arizona reported its highest number of Covid-19 deaths in a day, 147, according to the Covid and Johns Hopkins Tracking Project. At least two states reported a record increase in single-day cases on Saturday, according to Johns Hopkins data.

Trump says he will get involved again

Perhaps it’s an increasingly difficult situation in states with Republican governors increasingly implementing their own mask orders that make Trump look more isolated and change his tune.

But his solution, instead of more federal money for testing and contact tracing, is to return to his own press conferences.

“I will get involved and we will start doing briefings,” he said.

You may recall his previous reports, which CNN’s Kevin Liptak describes as “a hallmark of the early days of the pandemic. They ceased after Trump repeatedly found himself training with reporters and attacking tangents, including one on disinfectant ingestion. ”

Why the change? Liptak writes: “Trump’s aides are concerned that he may appear absent as the crisis continues raging. Trump no longer attends the daily coronavirus task force meetings and has not held a specifically virus-focused event in two weeks.”

He also noted that Trump sees this in terms of ratings rather than infections.

“I think it’s a great way to get the information out to the public,” Trump said, adding that they would likely resume on Tuesday at 5 p.m. ET, the same time he normally reported in the spring.

“We had a good space. A lot of people were watching,” Trump said, using the jargon of television ratings to describe the sessions. “We had record numbers watching,” he said. “There has never been anything like this in the history of cable television.”

One has to wonder how effective these new briefings will be if Trump launches in the self-destructive way he did to Fox News’s Chris Wallace on Sunday, in which he said he will eventually hit Covid. How many people will die and how long will that take?

No, martial law is not “law and order”

Over the weekend we saw distressing images of protesters in Portland being ripped off the street by unidentifiable masked men.

Trump applauded those tactics at the White House on Monday and said they are on their way to other cities run, he said, by “liberal Democrats.”

That’s the president targeting cities run by his political opponents with a militarized police force.

That’s not normal. That shouldn’t be normal.

It is clear that his vision of “law and order” is more like “martial law”. Read more here.

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