August 15, 2020: Trump Impressed by Own Performance on Coronavirus

 

8/15/20: Trump spends another day as President of the United States at his private resort in Bedminster, N.J. 

He plays another round of golf.

 

He does make time to tell reporters he disagrees with Dr. Robert Redfield, the man he chose to head the CDC. Wednesday, Dr. Redfield warned that we could face “the worst fall [season], from a public health perspective, we’ve ever had.” Trump pushed back on that assessment. “If you look at these numbers,” he said, displaying a few deceptive charts, “they’re coming down, very substantially [emphasis added].” He noted that many Americans are now wearing masks. He said that was good. Then he reverted to blaming Dr. Fauci, who said, in February, that not everyone needed to wear a mask. “And so did Dr. Redfield,” the president added. 

In other words: Blame them for the spread. They forced him to scoff at mask-wearing in March. April. May. June and July.

 

Trump repeated himself, saying that when you looked at the numbers, and considered how his administration has handled the crisis, “We’ve done it right.” Then he insisted, “It’s very impressive.”

 

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Trump could be taking some kind of mood enhancer, which would explain his rosy view of our place in the world.

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Suppose we fact check Mr. Trump. Japan is currently witnessing what, for them, is a serious spike in cases. Today they had 1,360. Their population is a third of ours. We had 55,348. Germany had 1,548, and with one fourth our population you can do the math. Belgium, with 11.6 million citizens, had 929 cases, a dangerous increase since early July, when they were under a hundred cases most days. The state of Georgia, with a million fewer people, had 3,273 infections. South Korea, with 51.3 million people, had a spike with 279 cases on August 15. Florida and Texas, with a combined 51.7 million people, had 6,352 and 8,245 cases. 

Combined, that works out to 52 times as many.

 

We can check current death rates: most people killed by the virus, per million in population. The top ten countries in the world, including two tiny principalities you never heard of: 

San Marino: 1,237 deaths per million (42 dead)

Belgium: 857

Peru: 789

Andorra: 686 (53 dead)

Spain: 612

United Kingdom: 609

Italy: 586

Sweden: 572

Chile: 543

USA: 522 (we’re #1 in total deaths, with more than 167,000)

 

Trump could be taking some kind of mood enhancer, which would explain his rosy view of our happy place in the world. A realistic look at the numbers shows his handling of the crisis is not “very impressive.”