Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, Charlotte, North Carolina, March 2, 2020 (Mike McCarn/AP)

America’s top infectious disease experts say Donald Trump’s upcoming campaign rally is a “perfect storm” for the resurgence of Coronavirus.

Dr. Nahid Bhadelia of the Boston University School of Medicine warned on Sunday about Trump’s rally, scheduled for Saturday in Tulsa, Oklahoma:

It’s a perfect storm setup: the idea of tons of people, where one sick person can have an impact of generating secondary cases on this immense level, where it’s indoors, where there’s no ventilation.

I would move it to the outdoors, I would reduce the number of people, I would introduce social distancing, and I would require everybody to wear a mask.

The warning echoed that of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House’s top infectious disease expert, who said on Friday, “I have not specifically spoken to [Trump] about that, but the principles that I have been espousing hold true.”

But Fauci and the other White House medical advisors have been sidelined after last month’s statement by Trump that ingestion of disinfectant and ultraviolet treatment might cure Coronavirus.

TrumpWatch, Day 1,240: Coronavirus — Fauci Warns Against Trump Campaign Rally

Unsettled by his declining approval rating and trailing Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden in polls, Trump insisted on the rally in defiance of medical advice.

He initially scheduled the gathering for Friday, but faced criticism that June 19 is “Juneteenth”, the anniversary of the formal freeing of slaves after the US Civil War.

Trump shifted the date, but not the site — even though Tulsa is the site of one of the largest mass killings of African Americans in US history. Up to 300 people were slain by white gangs in the Greenwood district in 1921.

TrumpWatch, Day 1,240: Coronavirus — Fauci Warns Against Trump Campaign Rally

“Hospitals at Risk of Being Overwhelmed”

The experts also expressed concern about the quick lifting of stay-at-home and social distancing measures, demanded by Trump for a “re-opening” of the US amid his quest for a second term.

The US death toll is now 115,732, with about 800 fatalities per day. Confirmed cases are almost 2.1 million.

While the hardest-hit states like New York have curbed their death rates, cases are rising in 22 states, most of them led by Republican governors who followed Trump’s re-opening.

Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said Sunday that Coronavirus “is not going to rest” until it infects about 60% to 70% of the population.

Virologist Joseph Fair explained, “Once it gets so ingrained in the population, there’s not a point where we can come back from that other than having a vaccine in place.”

Fair and other experts explained that the rise in almost half of US states, with level rates in eight others, cannot be explained simply by more testing. They cited the rise in hospitalizations in several states.

Dr. Bhedelia cited hospital bed use of more than 80% in states such as Arizona and North Carolina:

Hospitals are at risk of getting overwhelmed and that is basically signaling to me that those states are already behind….

We opened too early in those states. We didn’t have the ability to basically trace down those chains of transmission and stop them once people started mingling again.

The warnings

Trump made no comment on Coronavirus on Sunday, his 74th birthday. Instead, he spent the day on the golf course and assailing Black Lives Matter, the “Radical Left”, and “Fake News Media” on Twitter.