Tag: Trump botched COVID-19 response
Trump administration bars international college students if their school’s classes are all online
Colleges could be in a tough spot if they want to keep international students enrolled.
International students who attend college in the United States on visas will be barred from staying in the country if their school’s classes are entirely online during the fall semester, the Trump administration said Monday.
The announcement comes as colleges nationwide are grappling with how to teach students during the coronavirus pandemic, with schools like Harvard announcing all-online learning for the entire school year.
Many colleges will be left in a tough spot by the policy: Reopen their schools to in-person learning despite rising numbers of coronavirus infections or face losing international students and their tuition. Some international students already had left the U.S. when the pandemic broke out and they and their colleges were hoping they could return in the fall, but most are thought to have remained here. Continue reading.
Trump says White House will pressure governors to open schools
President Trump on Tuesday said the White House would put pressure on governors to get schools opened in the fall amid rising coronavirus cases in the United States.
At a White House summit, Trump signaled the full-court press, saying it would not be good politically to keep schools closed.
“We don’t want people to make political statements or do it for political reasons. They think it’s going to be good for them politically, so they keep the schools closed. No way,” Trump said during a White House event with government officials and school administrators. Continue reading.
Trump administration moves to formally withdraw US from WHO
The White House has officially moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), a senior administration official confirmed Tuesday, breaking ties with a global public health body in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
The U.S. has submitted its withdrawal notification to the United Nations secretary-general, the official said. Withdrawal requires a year’s notice, so it will not go into effect until July 6, 2021, raising the possibility the decision could be reversed.
Sen. Bob Menendez (N.J.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, tweeted that the administration informed Congress of the withdrawal plans. Continue reading.
The ‘Covid Cocktail’: Inside a Pa. nursing home that gave some veterans hydroxychloroquine even without covid-19 testing
SPRING CITY, Pa. — They wrapped the dead in body bags and raced back to treat the living, crammed into a nursing home that, day after day, played the somber sound of taps over the speaker system so the veterans who lived there had the chance to say goodbye.
The nurses and aides at the Southeastern Veterans’ Center in the suburbs of Philadelphia had watched so much go wrong since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. The communal dining that lasted into April, the nights that feverish patients were left to sleep beside roommates who weren’t sick yet. “Merry Christmas,” one nurse told another when they finally got N95 masks, weeks into the crisis and just before administrators stopped staffing the isolation rooms because too many people were feared infected.
But what worried some nurses most was what they called the “covid cocktail,” the widespread, off-label use of one of the antimalarial drugs touted by President Trump in March as a potentially game-changing treatment for covid-19. Continue reading.
States mandate masks, begin to shut down again as coronavirus cases soar and hospitalizations rise
The pandemic map of the United States burned bright red Monday, with the number of new coronavirus infections during the first six days of July nearing 300,000 as more states and cities moved to reimpose shutdown orders.
After an Independence Day weekend that attracted large crowds to fireworks displays and produced scenes of Americans drinking and partying without masks, health officials warned of hospitals running out of space and infection spreading rampantly. The United States is “still knee deep in the first wave” of the pandemic, Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday.
Fauci noted that while Europe managed to drive infections down — and now is dealing with little blips as it reopens — U.S. communities “never came down to baseline and now are surging back up,” he said in an interview conducted on Twitter and Facebook with his boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. Continue reading.
Live updates: Fauci calls focus on lower coronavirus death rate, touted by Trump, ‘a false narrative’
The nation’s top infectious-disease expert on Tuesday called recent focus on the coronavirus’s decreasing mortality rate in the United States a “false narrative,” while President Trump continued to tout those numbers on Twitter.
“It’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death,” said Anthony S. Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force, during a news conference. He said that the country has gotten better at treating people and that the average age of virus patients is dropping.
Trump has called “99 percent” of coronavirus cases “totally harmless,” contradicting health experts, even as rising new infections and hospitalizations in many states prompt some alarmed officials to roll back reopening. Continue reading.
Coronavirus updates: Seven-day average case total in the U.S. sets record for 27th straight day
NOTE: This article is being provided free of charge by The Washington Post.
Officials in states with surging coronavirus cases issued dire warnings and blamed outbreaks on early reopenings Sunday as the seven-day average for daily new cases in the United States reached a record high for the 27th straight day.
“We don’t have room to experiment, we don’t have room for incrementalism when we’re seeing these kinds of numbers,” said Judge Lina Hidalgo (D), the top elected official in Harris County, Tex., which encompasses the sprawling Houston metro area. “Nor should we wait for all the hospital beds to fill and all these people to die before we take drastic action.”
Here are some significant developments: Continue reading.
What the Lincoln Project Ad Makers Get About Voters (and What Dems Don’t)
“100,000 Dead,” an ad from the anti-Trump super PAC known as The Lincoln Project, comes at you like a miniature horror film. It starts with a shot of seven white body bags, detailed enough that you can see the outline of limbs underneath, and the voice of President Donald Trump at a press briefing in February. The nation’s Covid-19 caseload will soon be “close to zero,” Trump says; his words repeat in an increasingly distorted voice, as the camera pulls back to reveal row upon row of body bags in the shape of an American flag. New words land on the screen with audible thumps: “100,000 dead Americans. One wrong president.” It ends with the faint sound of wind whistling, as if through a graveyard.
Down to the smallest detail, it’s a masterful nugget of compact filmmaking. And it helped draw attention to a renegade corps of Republican strategists, veterans of campaigns for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, who are applying their attack-ad skills to their own party’s president—and going for the kill shot, every time. “Mourning in America,” their ad released in May, starts with a pointed reference to the Ronald Reagan slogan, then blames Trump for the full range of post-Covid despair, using images of hospital hallways, decrepit buildings and an upside-down flag. (Facebook slapped the ad with a “partly false” warning label, since it assigns Trump all of the blame for relief bills that were passed by the vast majority of Democrats in Congress.) “Debt,” released in late June, starts off like a History Channel documentary about the sacrifices made during World War II, and ends with an image of a Greatest Generation member, hooked up to a ventilator.
Some of the ads are running on TV, on Fox News or in battleground states. Some are simply released online, at a rapid pace. Many are based on assumptions that may or may not turn out to be true: that swing voters will be as unforgiving as Democrats about Trump’s Covid response, for instance, or that they’ll be bothered any more by Trump’s coarse rhetoric than they were, or weren’t, four years ago. Still, the Lincoln Project is clearly getting under the skin of the president and his supporters. And the evidence is not just raging tweets; in one of those Washington funhouse mirror moments, the Trump-friendly super PAC Club for Growth just released an ad attacking the Lincoln Project founders as if they were candidates themselves.
Confirmed coronavirus cases are rising in 40 of 50 states
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Four U.S. states — Arizona, California, Florida and Texas — reported a combined 25,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases Thursday as the infection curve rose in 40 of the 50 states heading into the July Fourth holiday weekend.
With the number of daily confirmed coronavirus cases nationwide climbing past 50,000, an alarming 36 states saw an increase in the percentage of tests coming back positive for the virus.
“What we’ve seen is a very disturbing week,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, said in a livestream with the American Medical Association. Continue reading.