Tag: pandemic

Donald Trump Jr. said covid-19 deaths are at ‘almost nothing.’ The virus killed more than 1,000 Americans the same day.

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Donald Trump Jr. declared Thursday night that coronavirus deaths had dropped to “almost nothing,” questioning the seriousness of the pandemic on a record-breaking day for new cases in which more than 1,000 Americans died of the virus.

Speaking to Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump Jr. pointed to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that he suggested show a declining coronavirus death rate.

“I went through the CDC data, because I kept hearing about new infections, but I was like, ‘Why aren’t they talking about deaths?’ ” Trump Jr. said. “Oh, because the number is almost nothing. Because we’ve gotten control of this thing, we understand how it works. They have the therapeutics to be able to deal with this.” Continue reading.

Coronavirus cases are on the rise in every swing state

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The Midwest, which helped deliver Trump the presidency, is now
the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States.

Coronavirus cases are surging in every competitive state before Election Day, offering irrefutable evidence against President Trump’s closing argument that the pandemic is nearly over and restrictions are no longer necessary.

In the 13 states deemed competitive by the Cook Political Report, the weekly average of new cases reported daily has jumped 47 percent over the past two weeks, from roughly 21,000 on Oct. 15 to more than 31,000 on Oct. 29.

Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania have all hit new weekly average highs in recent days, and in Florida and Georgia, case counts are growing again after having fallen from summer highs. Continue reading.

Inside the minds of the people who actually think Trump handled the pandemic well

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Countless critics of President Donald Trump, from liberals and progressives to Never Trump conservatives, have been arguing that Trump deserves to be voted out of office on Tuesday, Nov. 3, because of his wretched response to the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis has killed more than 227,900 people in the United States and over 1.1 million people worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. 

But journalist Olga Khazan, this week in an article for The Atlantic, offers some reasons why many White males in Trump’s hardcore MAGA base actually admire his coronavirus response. And as absurd as their reasoning is, Khazan’s piece is still an interesting read.

“Some 82% of Republicans approve of Trump’s coronavirus response — a higher percentage than before the president was diagnosed with the virus,” Khazan explains. “This is despite the fact that more than 220,000 Americans have died and virtually every public health expert, including those who have worked for Republican administrations, says the president has performed abysmally.” Continue reading.

As pandemic raged and thousands died, government regulators cleared most nursing homes of infection-control violations

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Despite promises of ‘aggressive enforcement,’ over 40,000 residents died in homes that received a clean bill of health

At the outset of a looming pandemic, just weeks after the first known coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil, the woman responsible for helping to protect 1.3 million residents in America’s nursing homes laid out an urgent strategy to slow the spread of infection.

In the suburbs of Seattle, federal inspectors had found the Life Care Center of Kirkland failed to properly care for ailing patients or alert authorities to a growing number of respiratory infections. At least 146 other nursing homes across the country had confirmed coronavirus cases in late March when Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, vowed to help “keep what happened in Kirkland from happening again.”

The federal agency and its state partners, Verma said, would conduct a series of newly strengthened inspections to ensure 15,400 Medicare-certified nursing homes were heeding long-standing regulations meant to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. It was another key component of a national effort, launched in early March, to shore up safety protocols for the country’s most fragile residents during an unprecedented health emergency. Continue reading.

Winter COVID-19 wave poses threat to nation’s hospitals

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Coronavirus hospitalizations are rising in the United States as a wave builds ahead of winter, threatening to overwhelm hospitals in some areas. 

Several major European countries currently have even worse outbreaks than the U.S., but former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned Wednesday that the U.S. is on a trajectory to match them in about three weeks. 

Already, hospitals in some areas of the U.S. are showing strain given the ever-mounting rise in cases and hospitalizations, which are not showing any signs of slowing down.  Continue reading.

FACT SHEET: How the Trump Administration’s COVID Response Failed Minnesota

Ahead of Trump’s visit to Rochester, Minnesota today, the DFL Party is releasing the memo fact sheet below on how the Trump administration’s disastrous management of the coronavirus pandemic has failed Minnesotans.

FACT: Donald Trump’s failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic is leaving working families behind.

  • Trump didn’t just fail to prepare for coronavirus: he abandoned states to face it alone. Minnesota has seen over 139,000 positive cases of COVID-19 and over 2,440 deaths.
  • Over eight months since the pandemic came to the United States, and some frontline workers still struggle to get the PPE they need to work safely. 
  • Now, Trump’s White House admits they have given up on any plan to tackle the pandemic just as Minnesota is facing a record number of hospitalizations. 
Continue reading “FACT SHEET: How the Trump Administration’s COVID Response Failed Minnesota”

Senior Trump official tests positive for coronavirus after trip to Europe

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A senior Trump administration official tested positive for the coronavirus after a recent trip to Britain, Hungary and France, raising concerns about the spread of the virus to high-level officials across the Atlantic, according to four U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the situation.

Peter Berkowitz, the director of policy planning at the State Department, met with senior officials at 10 Downing Street and the Foreign Office in London, and with officials in Budapest and Paris earlier this month. One official said that Berkowitz’s mask-wearing and social distancing practices were lax during the trip and that U.S. embassy staff in Europe expressed some concerns before the trip about him traveling during the pandemic.

A State Department spokeswoman denied that Berkowitz’s mask usage was insufficient and said precautions were taken. She, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss individual coronavirus infections. Continue reading.

Walz calls on Minnesotans to hold the line on COVID-19

People letting their guard down, aiding the virus’ spread, officials say. 

Gov. Tim Walz urged Minnesotans to stick with mask-wearing and social distancing to reduce the spread of COVID-19 after conferring with a top White House official over the weekend and looking at troubling infection growth rates in bordering states.

“The next six to 12 weeks are going to be critical in this fight on COVID,” Walz said Monday at a news conference.

Walz and state health officials struck perhaps their most concerning tone in weeks regarding the pandemic — with several meaningful metrics of the spread of the novel coronavirus going in the wrong direction. Continue reading.

Gaffes put spotlight on Meadows at tough time for Trump

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For Mark Meadows, the gaffes have come at exactly the wrong time.

Meadows, President Trump‘s resolutely charming chief of staff, rose from Congress to the White House earlier this year on the wings of his devout loyalty to the president and an uncanny faculty for staying on message in front of the TV cameras.

Yet on several occasions this month — with Election Day looming and Trump trailing badly in the polls — Meadows has found himself racing to mop up contentious comments he’s made about the coronavirus, most recently his statement Sunday that the country is “not going to control the pandemic.” Continue reading.

White House signals defeat in pandemic as coronavirus outbreak roils Pence’s office

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The presidential campaign was roiled this weekend by a fresh outbreak of the novel coronavirus at the White House that infected at least five aides or advisers to Vice President Pence, a spread that President Trump’s top staffer acknowledged Sunday he had tried to avoid disclosing to the public.

With the election a little over a week away, the new White House outbreak spotlighted the administration’s failure to contain the pandemic as hospitalizations surge across much of the United States and daily new cases hit all-time highs.

The outbreak around Pence, who chairs the White House’s coronavirus task force, undermines the argument Trump has been making to voters that the country is “rounding the turn,” as the president put it at a rally Sunday in New Hampshire. Continue reading.