Politico | White House defiant as US coronavirus deaths pass 130,000
- Trump administration officials highlight decline in death rates as sign of success
- State and local officials seek national mask mandate while president tweets about grievances with media
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Max Cohen on politico.com on July 6, 2020.
Mayors in hard-hit states such as Florida and Texas publicly urged President Donald Trump to approve a national mandate for wearing masks. Instead, the president on Monday afternoon focused on the declining coronavirus death rates and aired his grievances with the media.
“Why isn’t the Fake News reporting that Deaths are way down? It is only because they are, indeed, FAKE NEWS!!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Meadows said Trump would be willing to wear a mask in tight quarters, but said mask mandates should be a state issue.
Thirty-two states saw their coronavirus cases increase during the past week, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The increases are fuelled by spikes in California, Florida and Texas, where hospitalisations approached record highs.
On Sunday, Florida’s total case count passed 200,000. The same day, California set the single-day state record for recorded coronavirus cases with 11,786.
00:40
US should 'slow the testing’ for ‘kung flu’, says Trump in rally remarks on Covid-19
The increase in coronavirus cases comes amid a rise in testing. But experts say the uptick in Covid-19 cases is not simply due to the expansion of testing, which is rising more slowly than the number of new infections.
Yet as cases trend upwards, death rates are declining. The number of deaths attributed to Covid-19 in the United States is now around 600 a day, compared to as many as 3,000 a day in April and May.
While a subsequent increase in deaths may come weeks after a rise in positive coronavirus tests, experts say the current decreasing death rates are caused by widespread testing, improved treatments and the virus affecting greater numbers of younger Americans.
Trump celebrated the decline in death rates in a series of weekend tweets.
Masks ‘strongly encouraged’ at next Trump rally after virus cases in Tulsa
“In a certain way, our tremendous Testing success gives the Fake News Media all they want, CASES,” he wrote on tweeted. “In the meantime, Deaths and the all important Mortality Rate goes down.”
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Monday touted the lower mortality rates as a sign of success.
“This president takes Covid[-19] seriously, but we should note the mortality rate and how well we‘re doing vis-à-vis to the rest of the world,” McEnany told Fox News.
The administration‘s pushback came as American medical organisations urged the public to wear masks and physically distance as coronavirus cases spike.
“This is why as physicians, nurses, hospital and health system leaders, researchers and public health experts, we are urging the American public to take the simple steps we know will help stop the spread of the virus: wearing a face mask, maintaining physical distancing, and washing hands,” read a letter signed by the American Hospital Association, the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association.
“We are not powerless in this public health crisis, and we can defeat it in the same way we defeated previous threats to public health – by allowing science and evidence to shape our decisions and inform our actions,” the organisations wrote.
Local officials in states with surging cases, meanwhile, scrambled to deal with the growing strain on hospitals.
In Florida‘s Miami-Dade County, Mayor Carlos Gimenez on Monday signed an emergency order closing gyms, party venues and ballrooms, and allowing restaurants to operate only with takeaway and delivery services.
With eye on Trump re-election, Florida’s DeSantis defies pandemic critics
Florida has recorded a total of 200,111 coronavirus cases and 3,832 deaths as of Sunday, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project. The city‘s hospitals are nearly at capacity, Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami told CNN on Monday.
“When we opened, people began to socialise as if the coronavirus didn't exist, and I think they forgot how incredibly efficient the coronavirus is at propagating and how incredibly efficient it is at spreading,” Suarez said.
Suarez called for a national mask mandate and said it was no different than requiring seat belts to be worn. Mayor Dan Gelber of Miami Beach echoed that sentiment and pleaded with the president to set an example by portraying mask-wearing as a show of strength.
“That would help so much, because right now people are looking for a message that is the path of least resistance,” Gelber told CNN. “And when the president of the United States gives them a path of least resistance, they‘re taking it, and it‘s killing people right now.”
Politicians in Texas, another coronavirus hotspot, also pushed for mask mandates and disputed Trump’s claims about testing being largely responsible for the spike in cases.
“We’ve been increasing testing for a long time now, and one key indicator of the fact that this isn’t about testing is the fact that our positivity rate has skyrocketed,” Mayor Ron Nirenberg of San Antonio told MSNBC, adding that he supports a nationwide mask mandate.
“What this is is a very fast, too fast opening of the Texas economy.”
