On Sunday, President Donald Trump took a sensible new stance, extending strict social-distancing guidelines at least through April 30. The extended guidelines appear to heed the concerns of Trump’s respected medical advisers and reflect a grim reality.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump took a sensible new stance, extending strict social-distancing guidelines at least through April 30. The extended guidelines appear to heed the concerns of Trump’s respected medical advisers and reflect a grim reality.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, publicly estimated Sunday that 100,000-200,000 people in the U.S. could die of COVID-19, even with aggressive mitigation measures. Those figures were updated by the White House on Tuesday to an estimated 100,000-240,000.
Still, dangerous COVID-19 denialism abounds. Some of it is fueled by amateur number-crunching about current confirmed cases and death rates. These lowball calculations have several major problems. Among them are the lack of testing and the fact that this is the early stage of the contagion in this country.
Today’s numbers aren’t tomorrow’s numbers, and medical experts have a lot to learn about the behavior of this new coronavirus. How it acts in one location is no guarantee it will act the same in another.
Trump’s inconsistent statements about COVID-19 have also not been helpful in getting people to take this public health threat seriously. He downplayed the disease’s spread earlier this year, and since then his statements have varied week to week.
The month ahead is critical in containing the virus, and everyone needs to help by staying home to break the chain of infection. Trump should keep pounding on the presidential bully pulpit. Given the bitter political divisions in this country, some will need to hear the message directly from him.
Trump’s welcome new guidance underscores the prudence of stay-at-home orders implemented by individual states and signals the need to move with caution in the weeks after to contain this viral threat.
— Star Tribune (Minneapolis)
