As virus reaches top echelons of power, Trump drives US to re-open

WASHINGTON: The White House itself has become a pandemic hotzone with people within one degree of separation from the President and vice-president testing positive for coronavirus, causing at least one key Presidential aide to say he is scared to go to work. Top members of the coronavirus task force, including the heads of the CDC and FDA, the two top agencies dealing with the crisis, have been forced into self-quarantine after coming within sneezing distance of an asymptomatic virus carrier in the White House. Two top military generals have tested positive. And the Senate Health Committee has been forced into holding a remote hearing on the pandemic after one of its staffers tested positive for the virus.
Such alarms at the top leadership level notwithstanding, the United States has re-opened for business, with President Trump taking a calculated risk to put reviving the economy above potential danger from ending the lock down too rapidly. “Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere. Big progress being made!” Trump tweeted on Monday morning, prefacing the remarks with his usual jab at the media – “Great credit being given for our Coronavirus response, except in the Fake News. They are a disgrace to America!”
The smackdown, following a tweet-filled Sunday during which the President tweeted or retweeted 104 times, came even as U.S fatalities ticked over 80,000 -- accounting for one in three Covid-19 deaths in the world –although the daily death count dropped sharply on Sunday. It went down to 803 deaths, only the second time since April 1 daily toll has fallen below 1000.
Still, experts and modelers warned that the US risked the toll going up to 135,000 or more by August if the re-opening happened too soon and too fast, even as reports from across the world, including ground zero in Wuhan, spoke of the virus resurfacing when hotspots re-opened. Wuhan in fact reported its first cluster of five infections since a lockdown on the central Chinese city was lifted a month ago, even as Shanghai Disneyland became the world's first Disney resort to reopen after closing for more than three months due to pandemic.
In Germany, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the federal agency tasked with managing the coronavirus pandemic, found that the reproduction rate of the illness — the approximate number of people an infected person passes the virus to — went up from .83 on Friday to 1.13 on Sunday after the lock down was relaxed in Germany; for the pandemic is die down, the R rate has to be below one.
In the U.S., the urge to reopen due to economic compulsions is laced with fear of the risk, particularly after the virus breached the White House. “It is scary to go to work,” Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the US President, said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday, highlighting the fact that even the most powerful in the land in arguably the best guarded compound in the world are not immune from the virus, or fear of it. Also spooking the capital was news that the Navy’s top admiral Michael Gildav and the chief of the National Guard bureau Joseph Lengyel, had tested positive.
The pandemic has now become a political football in the US with the conservative and right wing media and platforms accusing the left-liberal groups of exaggerating the threat and hyperventilating about it to bring down the US economy and have Trump, who is running on the economy, defeated in the election; liberal pundits in turn are warning that the right is glossing over and minimizing the danger, and it is because of the lockdown that fatalities have been contained to below 100,000 so far. They also accuse the right of being unmindful and uncaring of the old, the infirm, and the minorities, many of whom are frontline responders who are the primary victims of the coronavirus.
Trump himself is accusing Democrats of using the pandemic to defeat him, suggesting their insistence on extending the shutdown is aimed at destroying the economy, which would ostensibly undermine his prospects in the election. “The great people of Pennsylvania want their freedom now, and they are fully aware of what that entails. The Democrats are moving slowly, all over the USA, for political purposes. They would wait until November 3rd if it were up to them. Don’t play politics. Be safe, move quickly!” Trump tweeted on Monday, pushing Democrat-run states to re-open while putting the onus on safety on them.
Amid this ugly domestic scrap, the Trump administration is also lining up accusations that China is planning to steal US research to develop vaccines and treatments for the virus