By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
United States President Donald Trump remains divisive, attacking, and contradicting his officials over coronavirus, even as the disease has killed 160,833 Americans in the latest count, and surging with 4,936,836 infections.
Live updates by worldometers.info show that global figures have reached 707,166 deaths and 18,836,278 cases.
Top U.S. government experts say the pandemic is entering a new phase as it invades the American rural heartland – and they cannot say how long it will last, CNN reports
With millions of kids nowhere near going back to school and the economy reeling from a 32.9 per cent annualised contraction in the second quarter, the months ahead are stretching into what looks like an endless crisis as Trump tweets “Make America Great Again” and spends his weekends on the golf course.
Top administration officials in recent days have repeatedly delivered information and warnings that directly contradict Trump’s upbeat messaging on Friday on the virus: “We’ll get rid of it, we’ll beat it, and it will be soon.”
Amid this grim outlook, the administration and Capitol Hill Democrats are deadlocked on a plan to extend federal unemployment payments to millions of Americans who lost their jobs in lockdowns.
And Trump finally turned his ire at Dr. Deborah Birx on Monday morning, after the coronavirus task force coordinator acknowledged America’s grim reality on the battle against the pandemic over the weekend.
She had previously avoided both a raw assessment of the virus and therefore the president’s wrath.
Trump tweeted Monday morning that Birx had “taken the bait” after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had criticised Birx for offering what the California Democrat considered rosy and misleading assessments.
“In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!” Trump tweeted.
Birx had delivered a series of stunning warnings on CNN’s “State of the Union” five months into a pandemic that Trump once said posed no threat to Americans but has now killed more than 160,000 of them.
“What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal urban areas,” Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, told CNN’s Dana Bash.
Birx even suggested that some Americans in multi-generational families should start wearing masks in their home and assume that they already have the disease.
She did not reject a warning by former Federal Drug Administration Commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, that there could be 300,000 coronavirus deaths by the end of the year, saying, “Anything is possible.”
“To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus,” Birx said.
CNN adds that her comments came after her colleague, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told a House committee on Friday it was “unclear” how long the crisis will last.
But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told Americans to brace for an average of 1,000 deaths a day for the next 30 days.
And while there are some signs that infections have plateaued in sunbelt states in the last week, albeit at high levels, Birx’s words suggest new epicenters are looming, a situation hardly consistent with Trump’s description of “embers” of infection.
The president speaks optimistically about a coming vaccination – though experts say it could still be months away – and boasts about advances in therapeutics and of building thousands of ventilators.
But the horrible statistics of the pandemic are relentless with 1,000 Americans dying almost every day. And the administration response appears – as it has from the start – short of the scale needed to beat back the worst public health crisis in 100 years.
Assume you are infected
With a vaccine still lacking, Birx also warned that too many Americans were not taking the virus sufficiently seriously, in another jarring disconnect from Trump’s messaging.
“Across America right now, people are on the move … as I travelled around the country, I saw all of America moving.
“I think it’s our job, as public health officials, to be able to get a message to each American that says, if you have chosen to go on vacation into a hot spot, you really need to come back and protect those with comorbidities and assume you’re infected.”
Despite the worsening crisis, there is no sign of a new administration approach, or evidence of an effort to set up the massive testing and tracing nationwide program that experts say is needed to finally get a handle on the crisis.
But surprisingly, Birx said the administration had already re-examined its approach.
“I think the federal government reset about five to six weeks ago when we saw this starting to happen across the South,” she told Bash.
At the start of a rough six-week period that saw the virus surge unimpeded through Florida, Texas, Arizona and other states that Trump pressured to open before the pathogen was under control, Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the coronavirus task force, declared in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the U.S. is “winning the fight” and there “isn’t a ‘second wave.'”
Birx has faced criticism for becoming too compliant with the administration’s political line rather than following the science where it leads.
She defended herself on “State of the Union” after Pelosi said she didn’t have confidence in the veteran public health official because she was an appointee of a president who is spreading disinformation.
“I have never been called Pollyannish or non-scientific or non-data-driven,” Birx said on “State of the Union.”
She contradicted Trump’s call for schools to open everywhere, saying where there is a high caseload and active community spread, where people shouldn’t go to bars or have house parties, they should “distance-learn at this moment so we can get this epidemic under control.”
Another senior administration official involved in the fight against the pandemic, testing czar Adm. Brett Giroir, contradicted Trump’s fresh touting of hydroxychloroquine last week as a potential treatment for Covid-19.
“At this point in time, there’s been five randomised controlled, placebo controlled trials, that do not show any benefit to hydroxychloroquine,” Giroir said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
“I think most physicians and prescribers are evidence-based and they’re not influenced by whatever is on Twitter or anything else,” he said. “And the evidence just doesn’t show that hydroxychloroquine is effective right now.”
Trump’s disconnect on the crisis
According to CNN, far from showing that he understand the depths of the calamity and has a plan to address it, Trump spent the weekend spreading lies and disinformation in between two trips to his golf course in Virginia.
That again underscores how he has declined to adopt the leadership role that would have been expected from a traditional president during a grave national crisis.
He again falsely claimed that the only reason there are more cases of the virus is because the U.S. is doing new testing.
He gloated about “Big China Virus breakouts” in nations where reopenings have caused viral spikes and where leaders did a better job in quelling the virus than he did in the U.S.
Trump claimed falsely that the media was not reporting on such hotspots around the world.
He also launched a new attack on Fauci, who said last week that the reason Europe did better containing the initial pandemic was because it shut down far more of its economy that Trump allowed in the U.S.
