About 120,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus.
While the national number of daily deaths has declined in recent weeks, new confirmed cases are on the rise in almost half the country, including spikes in Florida, Texas and Arizona, where the president is headed Tuesday.
“We saved millions of lives, and now it’s time to open up,” President Trump said definitively Saturday night during his campaign rally in Tulsa, Okla.
Trump’s referring to an earlier estimate that found there could be up to 2.2 million deaths if the country did nothing to contain the outbreak. But he spent months downplaying the virus when health experts were imploring more action sooner. And those experts are now warning it’s not time to act as if the pandemic is over.
“[T]hat’s why I think you’re seeing right now increases in a number of states, because everybody’s back to a pre-pandemic mindset,” Michael Osterholm, director for the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and author of Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs, said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. He warned that the coronavirus is like a “forest fire” that is showing no signs of slowing down.
Early on, the pandemic was largely affecting “blue,” or Democratic-leaning areas, especially New York, but now most new cases are in the South and redder parts of the country. The Trump administration and some Republican governors have been blaming increased testing for the rise in cases, but in many places cases are increasing more than testing — and that certainly doesn’t explain away rising hospitalizations in places like Texas.
The campaign of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden is making competence a core part of its argument against Trump, and it hit him again for it because of other remarks he made Saturday night.
“When you do testing to that extent, you are gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases,” Trump said. “So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’ They test and they test. We have tests that people don’t know what’s going on.”
The White House says he was being “tongue in cheek,” but Trump has repeatedly said testing makes the United States look bad by, in his view, increasing the number of reported cases. A Democratic group has already cut an ad centering on his remarks.
It will be key to watch political reaction on the right if cases and hospitalizations continue to rise in these parts of the country, as things like wearing masks — something the president initially encouraged Americans to do — have become politicized.
So far, though, Trump’s power of persuasion with his base continues to outweigh the coronavirus’s shift toward Red America.
