Trump plays golf as U.S heads towards Covid 100000

WASHINGTON: A New York Times front page filled start to finish with one-line obituaries in small print of a thousand victims of the coronavirus pandemic greeted readers on Sunday, as the United States lurched towards the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths from Covid-19.
Evidently reconciled to the death toll and encouraged by declining infections and fatality rates, President Donald Trump headed out for a round of golf on Memorial Day weekend, when millions of Americans emerge outdoors to party and commemorate those who died to secure the country.
Trump himself -- described by critics as a petulant child for his insistence on not observing social distancing norms – once again disdained basic protocol, with television footage showing him shaking hands with a fellow golfer at his own resort in Sterling, Virginia, outside Washington DC. Opposition figures excoriated the President for golfing at the expense of taxpayers during a pandemic, but his fan base celebrated his insouciance even as he punctuated his outing with dozens of tweets that included fueling conspiracy theories, denigrating critics, and retweeting infantile memes and jokes.
“Cases, numbers and deaths are going down all over the Country!” Trump tweeted on Sunday morning, correctly as it turned out, with figures bearing out fewer cases of Covid-19 being reported across the country as a whole. New York governor Andrew Cuomo said the state lost 84 people to Covid 19 on Saturday, the first time the toll has fallen to below 100 since late march. "By any normal standard this is a hideous number. But we are thankful this number has fallen below 100 for the first time since late March,” he tweeted.
However, stray cases of Covid-19 outbreaks resulting from relaxation of social distancing norms continued to haunt health experts. In one instance in Missouri, two hairstylists potentially exposed 140 clients to coronavirus when they worked for up to eight days this month while symptomatic with coronavirus, health officials said. In Arkansas, the state governor said several people who attended a high school swim have contracted Covid-19.
Experts said the cases highlight the dangers of community spread across the U.S as businesses reopen after weeks of restrictions, with the Memorial Day weekend bringing people out in droves. With weather warming up across the country, beaches, pools, and parks are opening again, and people – particularly pandemic skeptics – milling around without observing social distancing is a common sight.
While the President himself epitomizes the gung-ho spirit of waving away the pandemic even though the U.S has the highest number of coronavirus positive cases, other countries may not have the same privilege. On Sunday, US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien said the the Trump administration is looking at restricting travel from Brazil, which now has the second largest number of cases in the world, surpassing Russia. Brazil’s leader Jair Bolsonaro had adopted a cavalier attitude similar to Trump’s about the pandemic, disdaining basic protocols such as social distancing.
But pandemic skeptics continue to push back against health experts they now call alarmists, cranking out new data to argue that continued lockdown would kill more people than it will save. A Stanford University professor and a JP Morgan analyst are among those who argue that countries and governments were spooked by flawed scientific papers and dodgy data, and resorted to panicky lockdowns that has caused untold suffering.
On his part, Trump is set on resuming his routines. The White House announced on Sunday that the President will travel to Central Florida to watch NASA and SpaceX launch astronauts from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade. SpaceX honcho Elon Musk is also a lockdown skeptic.