Guests get their temperature taken AT the official re-opening day of Walt Disney World’s Epcot in Florida, July 15, 2020 (Joe Burbank/AP)
The US again sets a daily record for Coronavirus cases, but the White House says medical and public health guidance must not stop the full reopening of schools from next month.
Confirmed cases rose by 78,309 to 3,576,156 on Thursday, shattering the previous daily record of just over 68,000. The seven-day average is more than 63,000, compared to about 22,200 a month earlier. All but five states have rising rates.
The US death toll is now 138,358, an increase of 951 for the second consecutive day. Florida broke its single-day death record for the second time this week, with 156 new fatalities. Nine other states — Idaho, Alabama, Arizona, Utah, Oregon, Texas, Hawaii, Montana, and South Carolina — have recorded daily highs this week.
Defying a smear campaign from Donald Trump’s camp and a ban on US TV interviews, the White House’s top Coronavirus expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said in a Facebook interview:
What I think we need to do, and my colleagues agree, is we really almost need to regroup, call a timeout — not necessarily lock down again, but say that we’ve got to do this in a more measured way. We’ve got to get our arms around this and we’ve got to get this controlled.
See TrumpWatch, Day 1,273: Coronavirus — Trump Camp’s Attack on Fauci Backfires
Pushing Away Science
But the White House bluntly rejected any medical and public health expertise.
Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany redoubled Donald Trump’s demand, driven by his pursuit of re-election, that schools must fully reopen: “When he says open, he means open and full, kids being able to attend each and every day at their school. The science should not stand in the way of this.”
McEnany later tried to assert, “Science is on our side,” but her focus was on praising Trump for his “historic Covid-19 response” and blaming states for the crisis.
Trump said little about the pandemic yesterday, preferring to praise his stripping of environmental protections and repeating that Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden — who set out a $2 trillion plan this week for economic recovery and a fight against climate change — wants to “abolish the suburbs”.
The White House’s message was pointedly rejected by action from State governors, including Republicans, on Thursday.
Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas and Democrat Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado were the latest leaders to announce mask requirements. Orders are now in place in more than half of the 50 states.
Governor Greg Abbott, once a leading supporter of Trump’s “reopening”, said Texas schools will be allowed to extend online-only classes. The directive overturned a threat by the Texas Education Agency to cut funding to online-only schools.
Puerto Rico joined the rollback of reopening, with Governor Wanda Vázquez ordering bars, gyms, theaters, and other businesses to close. Restaurant capacity has been restricted, and beaches are limited to those who are exercising.
Republican Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland wrote in a scathing Washington Post editorial:
It was clear that waiting around for the President to run the nation’s response was hopeless; if we delayed any longer, we’d be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death. So every governor went their own way, which is how the United States ended up with such a patchwork response….
It was jarring, the huge contrast between the experts’ warnings and the president’s public dismissals.
But Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, a diehard Trump ally, bucked the trend for responsible protections. He suspended city mandates for masks for implfiled a lawsuit to block implementation by Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.
The Trump Administration proceeded with its latest initiative to hide the scale of the crisis, implementing its orders for hospitals to withhold their data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
With the information going instead to a closed site of Health and Human Services, researchers, modelers, and experts can no longer see the numbers of patients and the demand on medical services. The percentage of intensive care bed use, a key marker of the situation, has disappeared from the leading site tracking the response to Coronavirus.
The President of the American Medical Association, Susan Bailey, said Thursday, “[W]e urge and expect that the scientists at the CDC will continue to have timely, comprehensive access to data critical to inform response efforts.”
Some state health departments and hospitals said the change in reporting protocols will make it impossible for them to continue providing data for now.
