Over 150,000 Americans have died of the coronavirus, 154,449 to be exact. Plus, 4,620,502 of our friends and family have the coronavirus, according to the Johns Hopkins data shown on CNN as of Sunday morning at 4:00 am ET. Did Donald Trump implement a national mandate to wear masks?
This is what the White House coronavirus task force coordinator had to say about those horrific numbers. Dr. Deborah Birx, aka Trump’s talking head, told substitute host of CNN’s State of the Union Dana Bash that the COVID-19 has reached far into the rural areas, too:
‘What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal urban areas.’
Birx said that it was important for people to pay attention to the CDC’s recommendations, because living in rural areas did not protect people from coming down with the disease:
‘To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus. If you’re in multi-generational households, and there’s an outbreak in your rural area or in your city, you need to really consider wearing a mask at home, assuming that you’re positive, if you have individuals in your households with comorbidities. This epidemic right now is different and it’s more widespread and it’s both rural and urban.’
At first, Trump projected the coronavirus would just disappear — 22 times. After the number of COVID-19 cases ran over his stingy predictions each time, he finally predicted 100,000 deaths last May, according to The Washington Post.
Now, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has predicted that over 173,000 Americans will die by August 22, CNN reported.
Still, POTUS wanted to open up the schools. Health experts pondered whether children were immune to this virus. However, probably, the most significant reason that the number was low, was kids stayed home. As more and more states and businesses reopened, health experts have figured out that not only can children catch COVID-19, they can spread it, too.
The former US Food and Drug Administrator Dr. Scott Gottlieb predicted that the death number could double by January 1, 2021. That was last month when he warned to expect 300,000 deaths by year’s end.
People would have to wear masks, wash their hands frequently, and stay away from people to change that statistic. Still, there has been no national policy.
Birx dared not get into the death toll, but she did indicate that the southern and western states needed to follow the CDC recommendations:
‘It’s not super spreading individuals, it’s super spreading events and we need to stop those. We definitely need to take more precautions.’
She continued, recommending:
‘[Each state has a] dramatically tailored set of recommendations based on what we are seeing at the community level, what we are seeing relevant to the hospitals.’
Trump started out delegating the responsibility for managing the COVID-19 virus to the state governments. That way he believed he would avoid any problems that came up before his November race. He did the same with school openings with one major exception.
He tried to force schools to open back up by threatening to withhold school funding. On Sunday, Bash asked Birx whether schools with a five percent state positivity rate should stay closed or rely on distance learning instead. Birx pointed her to the CDC guidelines:
‘If you have high case load and active community spread, just like we are asking people not to go to bars, not to have household parties, not to create large spreading events, we are asking people to distance learn at this moment so we can get this epidemic under control.’
Apparently, there was no common sense around this pandemic. If kids go back to school and sit in a room with one teacher, they all have an 85 percent chance of catching the coronavirus. One retired professor in education said that number could be higher.
When businesses opened up, more people got sick and died. Why would that be any different with schools opening up? People must start thinking differently to solve this problem.
Twitter world groaned under the staggering numbers of dead. Take a look at what they said below:
— Boo (@Boo64558345) August 2, 2020
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
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