Trump lied (what's new?) White House DOCTORS have ALWAYS said 100,000 to 240,000 deaths
Everybody assumed that the lowering of the White House prediction of deaths from COVID-19 from 100,000 minimum to 60,000 came from that Task Force. Not so. Apparently, they came from Dr. Donald Trump.
As I write this, the presumed death toll- which is probably far too low- is at 68,534
On Sunday night, the president raised his estimate to 90,000. Or 100,000. It isn't terribly clear.
But also Sunday night, Dr. Deborah Birx of the White House task force said in an interview, "Our projections have always been between 100,000 and 240,000 American lives lost, and that’s with full mitigation and us learning from each other of how to social distance."
What is Dr. Birx's reaction fo the small and much-overreported demonstrations by small numbers of gun-wielding far-right types in Michigan and elsewhere, supported by Mr, Trump in his "LIBERATE" tweets and other public statements? “It’s devastatingly worrisome to me, personally, because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a co-morbid condition and they have a serious or a very — or an unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives, So we need to protect each other at the same time we’re voicing our discontent.”
The protests were apparently organized on Facebook and involved a handful of people. Poll after poll has shown that they represent only a small minority of the American people, most of whom are overwhelmingly more concerned about a threat to their safety posed by a premature easing of restrictions than by the economic consequences of continuing the lockdown.
President Trump has always dismissed the threat posed by the SARS CoV-2 virus and sought to deflect criticism of his response to it. He described criticism of his response to the threat as "a hoax," It has become Republican party orthodoxy to advocate the re-opening of the economy before the doctors say that it is wise in a forlorn attempt to prevent or mitigate an inevitable financial crisis already underway and protect the President's chances of re-election. Even hitherto responsible publications like The Federalist have taken to describing COVID- inaccurately- as "the Wuhan flu" to make the crisis appear to be less serious than it actually is.
In other words, "COVID trutherism" has itself become pandemic on the right- a deadly secondary pandemic that is already costing lives in states which have seen a resurgence in COVID cases due to rushed or unwise easing of restrictions for political and/or economic reasons. Doubtless, the opening and closing of various aspects of the economy will ebb and flow in different parts of the country both now and through the nearly inevitable second and perhaps further waves of the pandemic. But the evidence continues to accumulate that this needs to be done with discretion and care.
The President continues to do everything he can to misrepresent the seriousness of the crisis for his own political benefit at the cost of human lives. And his supporters continue to make themselves accomplices to this. The people whose judgment ought to be relied on when it comes to COVID-19 and how we respond to it are people who do not have (R) or (D) after their names, but rather MD.
Meanwhile, scientists at three Dutch institutions have discovered that the virus multiplies in the human gastrointestinal tract, explaining why up to a third of COVID patients exhibit diarrhea or other gastrointestinal symptoms. It has already been shown to attack virtually every organ and system in the body, often leading to sudden deaths by stroke, heart attack, or pulmonary embolism by young and middle-aged people seemingly in good health or on the way to recovery from COVID due to the virus's tendency to promote abnormal blood clotting.
ADDENDUM: Oh, joy.
One of the few breaks we've caught is that SARS CoV-19 seems to be a slowly-mutating virus. But a mutated, even more, contagious strain has emerged.
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