The virus has reached 30 US states, killing at least 19 people, while the American capital announced its first case Saturday and 60 million people in California and New York state were under emergency orders.
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“We have a perfectly coordinated and fine-tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus,” Trump tweeted.
“We moved VERY early to close borders to certain areas, which was a Godsend. V.P. is doing a great job. The Fake News Media is doing everything possible to make us look bad. Sad!”
Trump has been heavily rebuked for repeatedly contradicting the advice of his administration’s experts in his public pronouncements about the coronavirus.
President to blame
He has downplayed the threat posed by the epidemic, which has killed more than 3,500 people since emerging in China, suggesting cases were “going very substantially down, not up,” falsely pledging that a vaccine would soon be available and claiming without evidence that the official estimate of the death rate was “false.”
Epidemiologists say the initial containment effort may have slowed the arrival of the virus but accuse the White House of wasting time with a strategy concerned more with the political narrative than domestic readiness.
Chief among the complaints has been the lack of testing caused by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developing its own flawed kits, rather than using those approved by the World Health Organization.
“Many officials have a hand in this mess, but the president is the crucial variable,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a director of the Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance during the Ebola outbreak, wrote in The New York Times on Saturday.
“Errors happen in any crisis. But when a president insists on claiming success irrespective of reality, it becomes much harder for those under him to acknowledge and correct mistakes.”
New York became the latest state over the weekend to declare an emergency as the number of patients there rose to 89.
Locking down entire cities
Meanwhile, officials reported that two people at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference attended by Trump and the administration’s coronavirus point man, Vice President Mike Pence, had tested positive for the new coronavirus.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told NBC that officials were “accelerating dramatically” on coronavirus testing.
“You don’t want to alarm people but, given the spread we’ve seen, anything is possible,” he said.
A US cruise ship hit by the outbreak was given permission late Saturday to dock in California’s Bay Area on Monday, after reporting 21 infections on board.
He said a plan would be in place “within 72 hours” of Pence’s meeting with cruise ship company CEOs on Saturday.
AFP
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