In his long speech, the president rattled through a list of ways he has responded to the pandemic, claiming his administration “launched the largest mobilization since World War II” and even promising a vaccine before the end of the year “or maybe even sooner.”
“We are marshaling America’s scientific genius to produce a vaccine in record time,” Trump said. “We have a safe and effective vaccine this year, and together we will crush the virus. ”
Yet in front of him, on the White House South Lawn, sat 1,500 mostly maskless people close together.
They were in clear violation of social distancing and mask rules set by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D), who has banned groups of more than 50 people from assembling and required the use of masks when keeping six feet apart is impossible.
Brett Samuels, White House reporter for The Hill:
Alexander Nazaryan, national correspondent for Yahoo News:
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics:
“The Trump campaign told reporters the Republican National Committee worked with Patronus Medical, a medical, safety and health company, to institute ‘proper protocols’ in compliance with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to ensure the safety of attendees,” my Post colleagues report.
“But an overwhelming majority of the attendees were not expected to be tested for the novel coronavirus, and chairs were placed only inches apart in defiance of distancing guidelines.”
At the end of the night, an opera singer invited attendees to join him in singing “God Bless America” – even though group singing is a prime scenario in which the virus can spread.
Post columnist Megan McArdle:
The final night of the Republican National Convention was an effort to portray a country that has moved past the crisis – a play to Trump’s base, where there are high levels of distrust in how the media have covered the pandemic and a tendency to spread conspiracy theories about public health officials (recall the “Plandemic” video).
Yet the nation is just now seeing an unexpected summer surge in infections and deaths start to subside. Around 1,000 people are still dying every day in the United States from the highly infectious virus. Millions of adults remain unemployed and millions of kids at kept home from school.
Trump also ignored his failure to replace the Affordable Care Act.
The president spent much of the 2016 election attacking former president Barack Obama and then-vice president Joe Biden for the sweeping 2010 health-care law – and promising to write his own health law.
“We will repeal and replace disastrous Obamacare,” Trump said during his 2016 speech at the RNC. “You will be able to choose your own doctor again.”
But in a series of dramatic episodes on Capitol Hill in 2017, the GOP-led Congress failed to agree on a replacement and ultimately abandoned the effort. To this day Trump keeps insisting there will be a replacement bill, but it has never materialized.
Sarah Kliff, investigative reporter for the New York Times:
Instead Trump has launched a different health-care attack on Biden in the covid era.
He painted his Democratic rival’s stated approach to the crisis as simultaneously too heavy-handed and too cavalier.
The Democratic presidential nominee wants to “surrender to the virus,” Trump insisted, a reference to Biden’s recent statement he’d shut the country down again to avoid another wave of infections if that’s what scientists recommended.
“Instead of following the science, Joe Biden wants to inflict a painful shutdown on the entire country,” Trump said. “His shutdown would inflict unthinkable and lasting harm on our nation’s children’s, families and citizens of all backgrounds.”
Trump predicted more drug overdoses, depression, alcohol addiction, suicides, heart attacks, economic devastation and job loss should Biden take the White House in January – although at that point a vaccine would be ready, should Trump’s promises come to fruition.
Trump also slammed Biden for criticizing his China travel ban at the pandemic’s outset earlier this year.
“When I took bold action to issue a travel ban on China — very early indeed — Joe called it hysterical and xenophobic. And then I introduced a ban on Europe, very early again. If we had listened to Joe, hundreds of thousands more Americans would have died.
Yet Biden has laid out his own, relatively detailed road map for responding to the pandemic.
His pandemic response plan promises to create a testing board to guarantee free testing, double the number of drive-through testing sites, build a national contact-tracing workforce and create a national pandemic dashboard where people can gauge transmission in their own Zip codes.
Biden has also pledged daily briefings with medical experts — something Trump is now allowing only sporadically. And he wants to restore the U.S. relationship with the World Health Organization, after the president broke ties.
Campaign surrogates, scientific advisers to Biden’s campaign, and former U.S. health policy officials told Stat News that the weeks leading up to Biden’s potential inauguration “would set off a mad dash to reverse the country’s pandemic misfortunes.”
“They described in detail a de facto Covid-19 war room,” Lev Facher writes in this look at how Biden might respond to the pandemic.
For all the Trump administration’s setbacks, there are some positive developments.
A few hours before Trump took the stage, his administration announced a pact to produce 150 million rapid coronavirus tests.
The White House has struck a $760 million deal with Abbott Laboratories to provide the tests, which allow users to obtain results in 15 minutes from a small card. It’s the federal government’s biggest step into testing, which Trump has insisted is mainly the job of state and local authorities, The Post’s Lenny Bernstein and Seung Min Kim report.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany:
“Though antigen tests like this one are largely used to screen large numbers of people to find those who may be infected, the FDA said the Abbott test ‘has been authorized for use in patients suspected of COVID-19 by their healthcare provider within seven days of symptom onset,’” Lenny and Seung Min write.
“The antigen test has a greater chance of a false negative result than the more reliable PCR test,” they add. “The FDA said users may need a second test to confirm a negative result.”
Ahh, oof and ouch
AHH: Some scientists are betting on a second wave of new, experimental vaccines.
“Seven months into the coronavirus crisis, with more than 30 vaccines rapidly advancing through the rigorous stages of clinical trials, a surprising number of research groups are placing bets on some that have not yet been given to a single person,” the New York Times’s Carl Zimmer reports.
At least 88 vaccine candidates are under preclinical investigation, many of which are unlikely to begin clinical trials until well after other vaccines are approved and distributed. But the scientists behind these later candidates are betting that different designs could let them win out in terms of effectiveness or price.
Some companies are hoping that newer experimental vaccine models could provoke a stronger immune system response, while others are banking on designs that could be cheaper and faster to produce on a mass scale. A few are working on developing a “universal” coronavirus vaccine that could protect people from an array of viruses, including those that are still lurking in other wild animals and haven’t made the jump to humans yet.
“The first vaccines may not be the most effective,” Ted Ross, the director of the Center for Vaccines and Immunology at the University of Georgia, told the New York Times. He is working on an experimental vaccine he hopes will go to clinical trials in 2021.
OOF: The World Health Organization says countries should try to test people exposed to the virus, even if they’re asymptomatic.
The organization waded into a firestrom caused after the Centers for Disease Control changed its guidance this week to no longer recommend testing asymptomatic people. The change came as thousands of people return to schools and businesses where broad testing is central to reopening plans.
Late Wednesday, CDC Director Robert Redfield appeared to qualify the agency’s recommendations, saying that “all close contacts of confirmed or probable COVID-19 patients” may consider testing. The advice on the agency’s website, however, has not changed.
Then, yesterday, the WHO said that when feasible, countries should try to test people who have been exposed to the virus even if they don’t show symptoms.
Maria Van Kerkhove, a WHO epidemiologist, said in a news briefing that the organization’s recommendations “are to test suspect cases” and that contacts of infected people “if feasible, should be tested regardless of the development of symptoms.” But she added that the focus was on those who developed symptoms.
OUCH: Evacuations triggered by Hurricane Laura could spark new covid-19 outbreaks.
“Texas and Louisiana were already struggling to contain the spread of the coronavirus when Hurricane Laura hit on Wednesday night, and now some experts are warning mass evacuations could be responsible for a new wave of infections,” NPR reports.
More than half a million people were ordered to evacuate before the storm hit. Officials housed people in hotel rooms or urged them to sleep in their cars, only using larger shelters as a last resort to avoid the spread of the virus.
But even with these precautions, health officials worry that displacement from the pandemic could spark new outbreaks.
A recent study from Columbia University, which is still under peer review, found that a hurricane evacuation could spark thousands of new virus cases.
Increasingly powerful natural disasters, like Hurricane Laura, could also drive a long-term mental health crisis.
“Mental-health experts worry the psychological toll from these increasingly common cataclysms — with a pandemic now overlaid on top — could be unprecedented,” Public Integrity’s Jamie Smith Hopkins and CJI’s Dean Russell report.
In a survey of hundreds of people who been affected by hurricanes, floods, and wildfires, Hopkins and Russell found that many had flashbacks and lingering anxiety.
Another recent study from Columbia University found that more than half of Houston-area residents have struggled with emotional distress in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, which hit the city in 2017
FEMA’s Crisis Counseling Program, however, only reaches a small fraction of survivors, and the funds only last for a year after the disaster, even though psychological effects often last much longer.
The U.S. is detaining migrant children in hotels before quickly deporting them.
The Trump administration has defended the practice as necessary during the pandemic.
“Most children who cross the border without permission are supposed to go to Health and Human Services shelters that are licensed by states, offer schooling and legal services, and eventually place children with family sponsors,” the Associated Press’s Nomaan Merchant and Evens Sanon report. “Instead, the Trump administration is holding children in hotels or Border Patrol facilities for days, sometimes weeks, before expelling them.”
Authorities detained 577 unaccompanied children, some as young as age one, in hotels through the end up July, up from 240 in April, May and June. Keeping kids in hotels violates anti-trafficking laws and a court settlement meant to protect migrant children.
The AP also found that some contractors in hotel were skirting public health guidance. Several immigrants told the news service that government contractors instructed them to place ice under their tongues to pass a temperature check before a deportation flight.
Large covid-19 clinical trials are lacking in diversity.
“Moderna and Pfizer, the companies leading the U.S. race for a coronavirus vaccine, disclosed this week they have enrolled more than half the people needed for the 30,000-person trials that represent the final phase of testing. But only about a fifth of participants are from Black and Hispanic communities, which have been hit hardest by the virus — lagging what several experts said should be the bare minimum of diversity,” Carolyn Y. Johnson reports.
Creating a vaccine trial that reflects the U.S. population may be critical in ensuring it’s widely accepted and works for everyone.
“Given that Covid-19 has disproportionately caused severe illness and deaths among Hispanic, African American, and Native American populations in the U.S., it’s of critical importance that vaccine trials adequately reflect this reality,” Peter Hotez, dean of the School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told The Post.
Coronavirus latest
- The Justice Department is seeking information on whether New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Michigan—all states led by Democrats—violated federal law by ordering public nursing homes to accept covid-19 patients from hospitals. The orders were meant to free up hospital space but were widely criticized for potentially fueling the spread of the virus in nursing homes, the Associated Press’s Bernard Condon reports.
- A team of infectious disease experts warned in a recent study published by the BMJ that the standard recommendation of six feet for social distancing may be too rigid. In some indoor settings, especially where people are signing or shouting, the virus may infect people who are much further than six feet away from the source. Meanwhile getting a little closer may not be such a big deal in lowest risk settings outdoors, although experts still don’t recommend prolonged contact, Ben Guarino reports.
The team of experts created a chart to show how different settings affect risk:
- A poll of 14 wealthy countries found that majorities in all but the United States and the United Kington approved of their government’s response to the pandemic. More than 90 percent of respondents in Australia and Denmark said their country had done a good job; in the U.S. and the U.K only 47 and 46 percent, respectively, said the same, Adam Taylor reports.
- Some covid-19 patients are taking an unusually long time to regain consciousness after being on a ventilator. Normally it can take patients on ventilators a day or less to clear the drugs that keep them sedated for ventilation, but some patients with Covid-19 are taking weeks to wake up. Doctors aren’t sure why, but some worry that patients who are unresponsive may be taken off life support too quickly, Martha Bebinger writes for Kaiser Health News.
The ongoing debate over reopening schools
- Nearly 4 out 5 school districts in urban areas will start their school years fully remote, compared to less than half of students in suburban or rural school districts, according to a report by the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell. Urban districts serve large number students from families living in poverty, and those kids may have the most to lose from missing out on in-person classes, Axios’s Kim Hart reports.
- A number of schools in Ohio and Pennsylvania have found dangerous bacteria in their water supplies. Prolonged closures because of the coronavirus mean that water has been lying stagnant in schools’ plumbing systems. It’s an environment ripe for the growth of the bacteria that causes Legionnaire’s disease, a respiratory condition that usually affects older adults and people with weakened immune systems, the Times’s Max Horberry reports.
