COVID-19 Is Surging. Donald Trump's Response Is Shrinking

Dr. Peter Hotez tuned into last Friday’s White House Coronavirus Briefing hoping he might learn something new. Hotez is the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor’s College of Medicine and one of the leading vaccine researchers in the world. He and a team of scientists are currently working to develop a coronavirus vaccine candidate, but that breakthrough could be months or years away. For now, Hotez wanted to know what federal leaders had planned to deal with the new spike in COVID-19 infections.

Sixty days had gone by since the American public had last heard from the White House Coronavirus Task Force. During that two-month lacuna, almost 70,000 of us died from COVID-19 and more than 1.5 million of us tested positive for the virus. Now, while the countries that were first hit by the virus — China, Italy, Spain — began to reopen their economies and send children back to school, the U.S. plateaued and then entered what appears to be a deadly new phase of the worst pandemic in a century.

But as Hotez listened to the briefing’s rotating cast of administration officials last Friday, he struggled to discern any cogent, consistent message about fighting the virus. What he heard instead, he says, was a mix of self-congratulation, stale science, and spin.

Vice President Mike Pence said the country had “flattened the curve,” even though the trend line of new cases was aimed unmistakably upward. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar described the recent surge in cases as localized “hotspots,” even though the places experiencing the largest new outbreaks — Houston, Miami, Los Angeles, Phoenix — ranked among the top-ten largest metropolitan areas in the country. Pence cited the declining fatality rate as evidence of progress, even though the data is unequivocal that virus-related deaths can lag behind infections by several weeks.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-coronavirus-pandemic-spike-texas-florida-california-pence-fauci-white-house-1022172/