A Fourth of July to Remember—So That We Don't Forget
If you’re American, you can be forgiven if you didn’t particularly feel like celebrating your country during this year’s Fourth of July holiday. If you’re not, your feelings towards the U.S., whether pity or schadenfreude are understandable.
The majority of the other early epicenters of the pandemic have largely figured this out, their curves crashing downwards and a sense of optimism returning and civic pride growing. But the U.S., despite being perhaps the nation best prepared to handle a pandemic of this scale and scope, has epically foundered. On Thursday, the U.S. tallied over 50,000 new daily cases for the first time. That number was shortly passed on Friday, when 54,461 cases were recorded. Whatever gains had been made in May and June have been wiped out, and then some.
The canonical telling of this tale of defeat won’t be told until all is said and done, but there’s no doubt that some of the blame can be placed on the politicization of the pandemic. Just consider the events of this past Fourth of July holiday. Largely, it was a subdued Independence Day celebration; the New York Times estimated that some 80% of holiday fireworks displays were cancelled this year, as officials deemed the public gatherings extraneous and potentially dangerous in the midst of a pandemic.
President Donald Trump, however, organized not one but three public events over the weekend: the first a fireworks display and Air Force One flyover at Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota on Friday night, the second at the White House South Lawn on Saturday, and the third a fireworks and air show at the National Mall also on Saturday. Reports in Voice of America and the Times, respectively, note that most of the crowds at the Mt. Rushmore and South Lawn events were maskless and made little to no effort to socially distance. Trump himself continues not to wear a mask in public, despite calls coming from even inside his own political party to do so.
At the Friday event—the same day the U.S. had its worst day yet in terms of new cases—Trump mentioned the worsening pandemic just a single time, to thank “our wonderful veterans, law enforcement, first responders, and the doctors, nurses, and scientists working tirelessly to kill the virus.” Instead, he spent most of the speech stoking divisiveness, denigrating and falsely characterizing the many Americans who have been calling for a reconsideration of how slaveholding politicians, businessmen, and, especially, the leaders of Confederacy are portrayed in public monuments, school curricula and more. “Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution,” he said.
On Saturday in the South Lawn, Trump spent more time on the pandemic, but continued to present misleading claims about the virus and the U.S. response. The most egregious and most confounding was when he stated without evidence that 99% of cases in the U.S. are “totally harmless.” While it is true that many who are infected do not show symptoms, based on current numbers, 4.57% of American COVID-19 patients have died, and that doesn’t take into account the many more who have had symptoms ranging from flu-like to extremely serious and requiring hospitalization.
These false minimalizations of the impact of the virus have been the lingua franca of the Trump Administration since day one. That’s because his primary concern is and has always been the economy, as gauged by traditional metrics like the stock market and gross national product; COVID-19 was from the start a clear threat to the health of the U.S. economy, and has proven to be even worse than most expected on that front. By pushing the false narratives that the virus isn’t dangerous, that masks don’t help, and that cases are only going up because testing is going up, Trump emboldened local Republican leaders to reopen their economies too soon, and now the chickens have come home to roost.
And yet, Trump still does not seem to understand—or is willfully ignoring—the seriousness of those grisly outcomes. However, it may be that Americans are fed up with the ongoing—and embarrassing—failures to contain COVID-19. A Pew Research Center poll published just last week found that 71% of Americans surveyed are angry about the state of the country these days, and a full 87% said they are now dissatisfied with “the way things are going in the country.” The most shocking part of this is that the share of Republicans that feel this way has surged from 45% in April to 81% in June, when the survey was taken.
Of course, this doesn’t translate into 87% of Americans agreeing to abide by the guidelines public health experts suggest are needed to get the U.S. back on track in containing the pandemic, but perhaps it suggests more are willing to listen than before, even if it means overcoming the treacherous political division that brought us here in the first place.
OVER THE WEEKEND
The Global Situation
More than 11.2 million people around the world had been sickened by COVID-19 as of 1 AM eastern time this morning, and more than 530,000 people had died.
Here is every country with over 200,000 confirmed cases:
Western Europe’s hardest-hit countries are mostly trending in the right direction these days; even the U.K., which had struggled until recently, is now averaging under 1,000 new cases a day (compared to well over 3,000 in early May). As a result, England has joined the European Union in reducing some of its travel restrictions, announcing on Friday it will lift a 14-day quarantine on travelers from more than 50 locations that have been deemed a "reduced risk" for spreading the coronavirus, reports NPR. The U.S. is not including in that list of 50.
Elsewhere in the world, things are not going nearly as well. Cases continue to rise sharply in India, which is now on the verge of passing Russia to become the third-most affected country in the world. Saturday set a new high for daily cases, with 24,850.
Officials in the district of Agra, one of the country’s worst-hit regions, announced earlier today that it would be cancelling plans to re-open the Taj Mahal. But nation-wide, lockdown measures continue to be lifted.
That’s an unfortunate trend across the globe. For example, South Africa yesterday also announced its highest single-day number of new cases, passing 10,000 for the first time, and yet the country has given no signs that it would close down the restaurants, casinos and movie theaters that were allowed to open up last week.
On the other hand, some countries are taking strong action to ensure that new spikes don’t send them back into a tailspin. Two regions of Spain re-imposed restrictions over the weekend in an effort to quell local spikes, according to the BBC . On Saturday, officials announced travel controls would be reinstated in Catalonia, in the northeast of the country, and earlier today, officials in Spain’s north-western region of Galicia said the same. And in Australia, which had seen double-digit daily case numbers for months, recent spikes to nearly 200 new cases a day on Friday and Saturday triggered officials to lock down nine housing estate tower blocks in Melbourne, where officials believe there is an outbreak.
The Situation in the U.S.
More than 2.8 million people in the U.S. had been infected with COVID-19 as of 1 AM eastern time this morning, and more than 129,000 had died. On July 4, there were 45,283 new cases and 1,277 new deaths confirmed in the U.S.
The general trend across the U.S. hasn’t changed much: daily highs were passed yet again over the long weekend in southeastern states like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, and in the southwest in Arizona and California.
In Houston, the epicenter of Texas’s outbreak, hospitals are beginning to go through the same shortages of supplies and personnel that New York City saw during the worst of its pandemic experience, reports the Times. Governor Greg Abbot on Thursday issued an executive order making it mandatory that all Texans must wear a face mask in public at all times.
Of all the new COVID-19 hotspots, California seems the most unlikely; its governor Gavin Newsom had issued the nation’s first statewide stay-at-home order, and this and other early actions had seemed to save it from the worst. However, Newsom ceded control to counties in late spring, and some began to reopen rapidly. With cases rising, Newsom has now ordered bars, indoor restaurants, movie theaters and other indoor businesses to close in most of the state.
Things are worsening in the U.S. prison system; the nonprofit news organization the Marshall Project announced that by the end of June, the total number of coronavirus cases among incarcerated Americans had reached at least 52,649, along with 11,180 cases among staff. At San Quentin State Prison in California, some 14,000 incarcerated individuals have contracted the virus—a third of the total population—and last week some of those incarcerated went on a hunger strike, protesting “dismal conditions.” Officials told NBC Bay Area that as of Friday, only one person was still striking.
Enclosed living spaces like prisons are likely to be hotbeds for the virus until a vaccine is ready. Another dangerous living arrangement is the shared dorms and houses on college campuses. Over the long weekend, the University of Washington issued a press release saying that at least 117 students living in fraternity houses have self-reported positive tests. It’s a grim preview of what could come if campuses bring students back in full force for the upcoming fall semester.
Two high-profile Republican figures in D.C. announced they’d tested positive for COVID-19 over the weekend: On Thursday, the Twitter account of Herman Cain, the former Republican presidential candidate and current Trump campaign surrogate, issued a statement saying he is being treated in an Atlanta-area hospital for the virus. Then on Friday, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr., tested positive for COVID-19, raising concerns that a number of top Republican officials have also been exposed to the virus.
Meanwhile, NBC News reports that senior White House officials say the administration is planning to roll out new messaging about the pandemic: that the U.S. needs to learn to "live with it." The administration plans to argue that the virus is not going away any time soon, and that, according to NBC News, "the country must figure out how to press forward despite it. Therapeutic drugs will be showcased as a key component for doing that and the White House will increasingly emphasize the relatively low risk most Americans have of dying from the virus, officials said."
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of July 5, 1 AM eastern time. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com.
If you were forwarded this and want to sign up to receive it daily, click here.
沒有留言:
張貼留言