Tag: Trump botched COVID-19 response

U.S. government debt will nearly equal the size of the entire economy for first time since World War II, CBO finds

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Report comes after huge increase in the deficit this year as government attempted to limit coronavirus fallout

For the first time since World War II, the U.S. government’s debt will roughly equal the size of the entire American economy by the end of this year, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Wednesday.

The rapid change is largely due to the surge in new spending that the government authorized as it tried to control the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

By the end of 2020, the amount of debt owed by the United States will amount to 98 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, the CBO said. That is up from 79 percent last year. Total government debt will surpass the U.S. economy’s size next year, the CBO said. Continue reading.

Tactics of fiery White House trade adviser draw new scrutiny as some of his pandemic moves unravel

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Peter Navarro has faced an internal investigation into his treatment of colleagues, and now two of his coronavirus-related actions are under internal scrutiny

Amid the Trump administration’s troubled response to the coronavirus pandemic, senior White House aide Peter Navarro has refashioned himself as a powerful government purchasing chief, operating far beyond his original role as an adviser on trade policy.

But U.S. officials say the abrasive figure’s shortcomings as a manager could influence how well prepared the United States is for a second wave of coronavirus infections expected this fall.

Navarro’s harsh manner and disregard for protocol have alienated numerous colleagues, corporate executives and prominent Republicans. In a previously undisclosed incident, the White House Counsel’s Office in 2018 investigated Navarro’s behavior in response to repeated complaints and found he routinely had been verbally abusive toward others. Navarro narrowly avoided losing his job, but the abuse has continued as the White House has grappled with the pandemic, multiple administration officials said. Continue reading.

Health care worker COVID-19 infections underscore mask needs

Infections are occurring in clinics and hospitals, but state health leaders believe the majority of doctors and nurses are infected while away from work

Dr. Deepi Goyal had personally treated numerous COVID-19 patients, and yet the infectious disease surprised him last month when he lost taste, felt exhausted and endured soreness as part of his case.

“I consider myself quite healthy, and it really took me down,” the Mayo Clinic doctor said. “Not only did it take me down, but it took me a while to recover.”

Minnesota hasn’t suffered the doomsday scenario of COVID-19 knocking out large swaths of doctors and nurses — leaving infected patients with nobody to care for them — but new data show the toll of the pandemic on health care workers and the need for continued use of masks and personal protective equipment (PPE) to act as safeguards. Continue reading.

Why President Trump’s ‘surreal’ call likely won’t change the Big Ten’s course

Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren spoke by phone with President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning, a day after the White House reached out to set up the call. Both sides have since characterized the conversation as “productive.”

But that doesn’t mean the circumstances surrounding the league’s postponement of fall sports have dramatically changed.

“I think it was very productive about getting (the) Big Ten playing again and immediately,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews on Tuesday. “Let’s see what happens. He’s a great guy. It’s a great conference, tremendous teams. We’re pushing very hard. … I think they want to play, and the fans want to see it, and the players have a lot at stake, including possibly playing in the NFL. You have a lot of great players in that conference. Continue reading.

Trump payroll tax deferral finds few takers among businessesDonald T

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September kicks off the payroll tax deferral period initiated by President Trump last month, but few businesses are expected to participate in a plan that would likely lead to less take-home pay for workers early next year.

Under guidance issued by the IRS last week, employers can stop withholding Social Security payroll taxes from paychecks from Sept. 1 through Dec. 31 for employees who make less than $4,000 on a biweekly basis. The money would then be collected by having businesses increase the amount of taxes withheld from paychecks in the first four months of 2021.

“This is like other tax deferrals that we gave which were very helpful to people,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said during a hearing Tuesday held by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis. “This is money in people’s pocket that they need now that is very important and very meaningful.” Continue reading.

Trump is misrepresenting coronavirus data again, and it’s extremely dangerous

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report released last week has quickly become yet another cause for public controversy and confusion. Why? Because the coronavirus data — which showed that 94% of people who die of COVID-19 also have preexisting conditions — has been widely misinterpreted by many (including, of course, our President).

For those who egregiously assert that COVID-19 deaths are overreported, this served as evidence that most of the people who died after being infected with coronavirus were actually already sick beforehand and that COVID-19 itself has only actually killed only around 9,000 people in the US. Here’s everything you need to know to remain on the logical side of this conversation.

The report released by the CDC was a breakdown of COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. from February to August, based on death certificates. First of all, this data is considered “provisional,” because these counts may not match counts from other sources, such as data from county health departments, the CDC stated in the report. That doesn’t mean the information is irrelevant, it just means that it’s subject to change. The CDC considers death certificates to be reliable sources of information because they include demographic details that state reporting agencies don’t, which makes them useful in figuring out what other factors (e.g.: like age, race, and underlying health conditions) may have contributed to a person’s death. Continue reading.

‘White House cover-up’: New report shows Trump and Pence withheld truth about COVID-19 as they spread lies

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As President Donald Trump and administration officials have been publicly downplaying the Covid-19 crisis and even predicting its imminent disappearance over the past several months, the White House task force formed to coordinate the federal pandemic response has simultaneously been issuing dire assessments of the nation’s fight against the pandemic behind the scenes.

Those assessments were kept secret from the public until Monday, when the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a trove of task force reports dated between June 23 and August 9 that highlight the extent to which Trump’s public proclamations about the Covid-19 crisis have diverged from the findings of experts operating in the White House.

“The task force reports released today show the White House has known since June that coronavirus cases were surging across the country and many states were becoming dangerous ‘red zones’ where the virus was spreading fast,” said Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), chairman of the subcommittee. Continue reading.

Twitter deletes claim minimizing coronavirus death toll, which Trump retweeted

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After President Trump retweeted a claim that discounted the coronavirus death toll in the United States over the weekend, Twitter took down the post that spread false information.

The tweet was originally posted by “Mel Q,” a follower of the baseless conspiracy theory QAnon, which posits that the president is battling a cabal of Satan-worshiping child sex traffickers. It was copied from a Facebook post and claimed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had “quietly updated the Covid number to admit that only 6%” of reported deaths — or about 9,000 — “actually died from Covid.”

The rest were people who “had 2-3 other serious illnesses,” said the tweet, which has since been replaced with a message saying it “is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules.” A Twitter spokesperson said the tweet violated the company’s coronavirus misinformation policy. Continue reading.

US surpasses 6 million coronavirus cases nationwide

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The United States has passed six million confirmed cases of the coronavirus since the beginning of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.

The country has also passed 183,000 deaths nationwide.

President Trump and his 2020 Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, have battled for months over the U.S.’s coronavirus response, with allies of the Democratic nominee hammering the administration over the U.S.’s status as the country with the most confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world.

In July, Biden accused Trump of giving up on the U.S.’s efforts to control the disease’s spread, claiming that the president “raised the white flag.” Continue reading.

Trump tries to dance around a devastating backdrop

Despite unemployment above 10 percent and millions of jobs vaporized, Trump is running on his economic record before the pandemic.

In the nine weeks left in the 2020 campaign, President Donald Trump has an especially daunting task: Convince a skeptical American public that the coronavirus-ravaged U.S. economy is actually roaring back and will soon return to the status he regularly calls the greatest in world history.

He faces serious obstacles. The U.S. economy pre-coronavirus was far from the greatest in history, leaving most Americans with little cushion for the latest plunge. Now Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and other senior White House officials risk sounding out of touch cheerleading a still-struggling economy with a jobless rate over 10 percent — above its peak during the Great Recession — and close to 30 million people getting some kind of unemployment assistance.

Republican speakers spent much of the GOP convention talking up recent gains — for women, for people of color, for other lower-wage workers — that have since evaporated. For millions of Americans, the rosy picture simply no longer exists while for others the numbers were technically accurate but skipped the context of the devastation that came before. Continue reading.