WASHINGTON (CN) — While the world awaits a vaccine for Covid-19 and the U.S. struggles to tamp down the spread in its borders, the senior-most public health officials of the Trump administration emphasized repeatedly to Congress on Friday that mask wearing, social distancing and proper hygiene are the keys to escaping the crisis faster.
There are more than 150,000 Americans dead of the novel coronavirus and the infection rate has soared to astounding heights in the few short months since Covid-19 jumped from zero cases domestically to 4 million and counting.
While the Trump administration released guidance for states to handle the virus at its outset in April, those recommendations were formulated to put states in the driver’s seat, leaving significant wiggle room for uncooperative officials and ultimately only outlining outbreak protocols that covered 15- and 30-day intervals.
This lack of a sweeping, uniform national strategy six months into the pandemic by the federal government prompted the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis to consult on Friday with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Admiral Brett Giroir, the assistant secretary of health for the Health and Human Services Department.
Presenting a graph showing a sharp rise in case rates in the U.S. while Europe infections plummeted, committee Chairman Jim Clyburn asked Fauci to explain just what went wrong.
“If you look at what happened to Europe when they went into shutdown or lockdown mode, they did it to the tune of 95%,” Fauci said. “In the U.S., even though we shut down, we only functionally shut down about 50%, in the sense of the totality of the country.”
Our initial transmission baseline was hard to beat, he continued, and those difficulties only continued when more states started to reopen in May.
“When we did that, what we saw, particularly in the southern states, we saw an increase of about 20,000 to 70,000 cases per day over time in that region,” Fauci said. “Now it is about 50,000 to 60,000.”
Universal mask wearing, elimination of crowding, enforcement of stricter social distancing — none of these standards were rolled out soon enough, he added.
The exchange unfolding in Congress prompted President Donald Trump to tweet at Representative Clyburn that the South Carolina Democrat didn’t “have a clue” on infection rates.
Making an inherently flawed comparison, Trump blamed America’s high infection numbers to “much more testing than any other country in the world.” The analogy is akin to saying that more pregnancy tests lead to more pregnancies.
Various members of Trump’s coronavirus task force and health agencies, including Fauci and CDC Director Redfield, have publicly disputed Trump’s rhetoric against testing. The rise in cases is authentic because it is shows not just increased numbers of tests distributed generally but increased positive diagnoses as well.
Fauci again confirmed this.
Republicans like Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who serves as the committee’s ranking member, defended the administration’s handling of the pandemic and urged Democrats to focus on the role China has played.
Covid-19 originated at a wet market in Wuhan, China, after the virus was transmitted from an animal to a human. Trump, despite praising China’s President Xi Jinping dozens of times when the pandemic first began spreading, now insists on referring to the disease as the “China virus” whether on Twitter or even more official pronouncements, such as the newly reinstated nightly White House briefings.
Democrats like Representative Maxine Waters and Jamie Raskin said these outbursts are precisely the kind of “politicization” of the virus, and the federal response to it, that deeply troubles them.
