WASHINGTON (AP)– President Donald Trump’s relentless see-no-evil posture on coronavirus testing– if you don’t search for the virus, the cases go away– defies both science and street sense. He took it an action further with a comment suggesting that screening be limited so the pandemic doesn’t look so bad
His aides passed that off as a joke. Trump contradicted them, saying he wasn’t kidding. He opposed himself, saying he was.
So it discussed the previous week as America’s considering disease and bigotry navigated a fog of falsehoods and distortions from the president. A tasting:
JUST KIDDING?
TRUMP: “You understand testing is a double-edged sword. … Here’s the bad part. When you evaluate to that extent, you are going to find more people, find more cases. So I said to my individuals, ‘Slow the testing down please.'”– Tulsa, Oklahoma, rally June 20.
THE REALITY: First, it’s not real that he ordered testing slowed. The federal government’s top public health officials affirmed one by one to Congress that Trump informed them no such thing.
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany stated the remark was “made in jest” and other senior aides likewise brushed it off as not severe. Trump didn’t play along. “I don’t kid,” he stated Tuesday when asked about the remark.
Then he reversed himself, telling Fox News on Thursday “In some cases I jokingly say, or sarcastically say, if we didn’t do tests we would look excellent.” However holding back on screening is “not the ideal thing to do.”
Trump’ wider point– “If you do not test, you don’t have any cases,” he also stated– turns science on its head. No one challenges the fact that testing for the virus is key to managing it. Evaluating is only one measure of the pandemic. It is also measured by hospitalization and death, which continue even if authorities were to close their eyes to spreading out sickness.
COVID-19 has killed about 125,000 individuals in the U.S. Infections are far higher than are understood since numerous who get the illness and pass it on are not tested.
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VOTING SCAMS
TRUMP: “There is remarkable evidence of scams whenever you have mail-in ballots.”– remarks Tuesday at Phoenix rally
THE REALITIES: No there isn’t.
Voting scams in fact is uncommon and Trump’s efforts to show otherwise have failed. Nonetheless, he continues the assertion, in what can be viewed as a pretext to discredit outcomes if he loses in November.
Trump designated a commission after the 2016 election to get to the bottom of his theory that voting scams is rampant. The panel dissolved without producing any findings.
Some election studies have reported a higher incidence of mail-in voting scams compared to in-person ballot, but the general risk is all but invisible. The Brennan Center for Justice said in 2017 the danger of voting scams is 0.00004%to 0.0009%.
When Trump made comparable assertions last month, Twitter took the extraordinary step of connecting fact-checking notifications.
Richard L. Hasen, an elections expert at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, recently composed in an op-ed that “issues are very rare in the 5 states that rely mainly on vote-by-mail, consisting of the greatly Republican state of Utah.”
Trump himself voted by mail in the Florida Republican primary in March. A half-dozen senior consultants to the president have likewise voted by mail, according to election records obtained by The Associated Press.
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MEMORIALS
TRUMP: “I’ve likewise explained that any rioters harmful federal residential or commercial property and defacing our monoliths will face extreme and prolonged criminal penalties. 10 years.”– remarks Tuesday in Phoenix.
THE TRUTHS: He has no such authority. A president is not a judge.
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TRUMP: “I have authorized the Federal government to detain anyone who vandalizes or destroys any monolith, statue or other such Federal property in the U.S. with approximately 10 years in prison per the Veteran’s Memorial Conservation Act, or such other laws that may be important. … This action is taken efficient instantly, however may likewise be utilized retroactively for damage or vandalism already caused. There will be no exceptions!”– tweets Tuesday.
THE REALITIES: This action taken “immediately” and “retroactively” is merely words. It has no impact.
The Veterans’ Memorial Preservation Act, gone by Congress in 2003, currently licenses fines or jail for up to 10 years for the damage of veterans’ memorials on public home.
The law covers “any structure, plaque, statue, or other monument on public home celebrating the service of anybody or individuals in the militaries of the United States.”
So all prosecutors got from Trump is a reminder of legal authority they already had.
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TRUMP: “They even vandalized– that’s right– the Lincoln Memorial. The Lincoln Memorial.”– remarks at Phoenix rally Wednesday, prompting boos from the audience.
THE TRUTHS: No one harmed the memorial housing the statue of Lincoln in protests that unfolded near it. An online photo appearing to show the Lincoln statue and a memorial wall blanketed by graffiti was fake.
The truth: Somebody spray painted “y’ all not worn out yet?” by the bottom of the steps to the memorial May 30 and the National forest Service cleaned it up.
” The only vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial was graffiti at the bottom of the actions at street level, far from the statue,” stated national forests spokesperson Mike Litterst.
He said vandalism at the Lincoln Memorial is uncommon however not unprecedented. “Most likely most notable was in 2013 when somebody sprinkled green paint on the statue,” he said in an e-mail. “And it was vandalized two times in 2017, once in February with black magic marker and once again in August with red spray paint on among the columns.”
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VIRUS RISK
TRUMP: “The number of ChinaVirus cases increases, because of FANTASTIC TESTING, while the variety of deaths (mortality rate), goes way down.”– tweet Thursday.
THE FACTS: No, increased screening does not fully represent the increase in cases. Individuals are likewise contaminating each other more than in the past as social distancing rules decline and “neighborhood spread” gets.
” Among the important things is an increase in neighborhood spread, and that’s something that I’m actually rather concerned about,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading transmittable disease professional, affirmed Tuesday
When it comes to Trump’s point about mortality boiling down, Fauci said that is not a pertinent measure of what is taking place in the moment with infections. “Deaths always lag substantially behind cases,” he stated. “It is conceivable you might see the deaths increasing.”
Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Illness Control and Avoidance, testified that “several neighborhoods are seeing increased cases driven by multiple elements, consisting of increased testing, outbreaks, and evidence of neighborhood transmission.”
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TRUMP on the pandemic: “It’s fading away, it’s going to fade away.”– Fox News interview June 17.
THE TRUTHS: It’s not fading and not ready to.
Coronavirus infections daily in the U.S. surged to an all-time high of 40,000 at the end of the week, eclipsing the previous high of 36,400 on April 24 during among the deadliest stretches in the crisis. Freshly reported cases each day have increased typically about 60 percent over the previous two weeks, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Earlier in the week, Fauci told Congress the U.S. is “still in the middle of the very first wave” and the necessary is to “get this outbreak under control over the next number of months.” He stated the New york city City area, as soon as an epicenter, has done notably well but “in other locations of the nation we’re now seeing a troubling surge of infections.”
The next few weeks “are going to be crucial in our capability to deal with those surgings that we are seeing in Florida, in Texas, in Arizona and other states,” Fauci stated. “They’re not the only ones that are having a difficulty.”
Fauci included: “Definitely there will be coronavirus infections in the fall and winter because the virus is not going to disappear.”
Stated Redfield: “As we get to the fall, we’re going to have influenza and COVID at the same time.”
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TESTING
TRUMP: “We have got the best testing program throughout the world.”– remarks Tuesday.
TRUMP: “We’ve done too great a task.”– interview Monday.
THE REALITIES: The U.S. is no place near the level of testing needed to stem the infection, according to his own health specialists.
Redfield testified that health officials are still working to significantly increase testing capacity, calling such growth a “vital foundation of our reaction.”
The U.S. presently is conducting about 500,000 to 600,000 tests a day. Numerous public health specialists say the U.S. should be checking nearly twice as lots of people day-to-day to control the spread of the infection. Aiming to the fall, some experts have required 4 million or more tests daily, while a group put together by Harvard University approximated that 20 million a day would be required to keep the infection in check.
Redfield said the U.S. was intending to increase screening to 3 million day-to-day by “pooling” multiple individuals’s samples, a technique that is still under review by the FDA. He worried the need for broadened monitoring since some individuals who get infected might disappoint signs.
” We still have a methods to go,” Redfield said.
The U.S. stumbled early in the pandemic response as the CDC struggled to develop its own test for the coronavirus in January, later finding problems in its packages sent out to state and county public health laboratories in early February.
It took the CDC more than two weeks to come up with a repair to the test sets, causing delays in diagnoses through February, a vital month when the virus took root in the U.S.
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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker and Matthew Perrone in Washington and Beatrice Dupuy in New york city added to this report.
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EDITOR’S NOTE– A look at the veracity of claims by political figures.
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