Tag: Trump

Obama criticises Trump administration’s virus response

Former US President Barack Obama has criticised his successor Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.

In an online address to graduating college students, he said the pandemic had shown that many officials “aren’t even pretending to be in charge”.

It is the second time in recent days that Mr Obama has hit out at the Trump administration’s coronavirus response.

He said it had been “an absolute chaotic disaster” during a leaked conference call last week.

The former president also gave an address to high school students that was hosted by NBA star LeBron James and was part of a special programme that featured numerous celebrities including the Jonas Brothers, Megan Rapinoe, Pharrell Williams and education activist Malala Yousafzai.

In his speech to graduates from several dozen historically black colleges and universities, Mr Obama said the Covid-19 outbreak had exposed failings in the country’s leadership.

“More than anything this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” he said.

“A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge,” he added.

More than 1,200 people have died with coronavirus in the US over the past 24 hours, according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University.

The total death toll now stands at almost 89,000, which is the highest anywhere in the world.

Mr Obama also spoke at length about the impact the pandemic is having on black communities in the US.

“A disease like this just spotlights the underlying inequalities and extra burdens that black communities have historically had to deal with in this country,” he said.

African Americans make up a disproportionate number of coronavirus deaths and hospitalisations in the US.Presentational white space

The former president also referenced the killing of Ahmaud Arbery – an unarmed black jogger who was shot and killed by two white men in February – during his address.

He said racial inequalities in the US were made apparent “when a black man goes for a jog and some folks feel like they can stop and question and shoot him, if he doesn’t submit to their question”.

“If the world’s going to get better, it’s going to be up to you,” he told the graduates.

Mr Obama has kept a relatively low profile since leaving office in January 2017 and has rarely spoken out about the actions of his successor.

But the pair have been engaged in several back-and-forths in recent days, leading Mr Trump to accuse Mr Obama and his aides of engaging in a criminal effort to undermine his presidency.

“The biggest political crime in American history, by far!” the president wrote on Twitter last week.

Trump says US reopening, ‘vaccine or no vaccine’

President Donald Trump says the US will reopen, “vaccine or no vaccine”, as he announced an objective to deliver a coronavirus jab by year end.

He likened the vaccine project, dubbed “Operation Warp Speed”, to the World War Two effort to produce the world’s first nuclear weapons.

But Mr Trump made clear that even without a vaccine, Americans must begin to return to their lives as normal.

Many experts doubt that a coronavirus jab can be developed within a year.

What is Operation Warp Speed?

Speaking at a White House Rose Garden news conference on Friday, Mr Trump said the project would begin with studies on 14 promising vaccine candidates for accelerated research and approval.

“That means big and it means fast,” he said of Operation Warp Speed. “A massive scientific, industrial and logistical endeavour unlike anything our country has seen since the Manhattan Project.”

Mr Trump named an Army general and a former healthcare executive to lead the operation, a partnership between the government and private sector to find and distribute a vaccine.

Moncef Slaoui, who previously led the vaccines division at pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, will lead the mission, while Gen Gustave Perna, who oversees distribution for the US Army, is to serve as chief operating officer.

Speaking after Mr Trump, Mr Slaoui said he was “confident” that a “few hundred million doses of vaccine” will be delivered by the end of 2020.

He acknowledged in an earlier interview with the New York Times that the timeline was ambitious, but said he “would not have committed unless I thought it was achievable”.

Many experts say a vaccine is the only thing that will give Americans confidence in fully reopening the economy in the absence of widespread testing.

What else did President Trump say?

“I don’t want people to think this is all dependent on a vaccine,” he said. “Vaccine or no vaccine, we’re back. And we’re starting the process.”

“In many cases they don’t have vaccines and a virus or a flu comes and you fight through it,” he added. “Other things have never had a vaccine and they go away.”

“I think the schools should be back in the fall,” Mr Trump continued.

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Earlier this week Dr Anthony Fauci, who serves on the coronavirus taskforce and appeared wearing a mask at the Rose Garden conference, testified to the Senate that it would be a “bridge too far” for schools to reopen in the autumn.

As Mr Trump spoke on Friday, lorry drivers who have parked around the White House for several weeks blared their horns in protest against low wages, neither for nor against the president.

“Those are friendly truckers. They’re on our side,” Mr Trump said. “It’s almost a celebration in a way.”

At one point, the president – who wore no mask – instructed a reporter to remove hers so she could be better heard over the noise of honking as she addressed him.

Trump fires state department inspector general

The US state department’s inspector general, Steve Linick, has become the latest senior official to be fired by US President Donald Trump.

Mr Trump said Mr Linick no longer had his full confidence and that he would be removed in 30 days.

Mr Linick had begun investigating Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for suspected abuse of office, reports say.

Democrats say Mr Trump is retaliating against public servants who want to hold his administration to account.

“It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as inspectors general. That is no longer the case with regard to this inspector general,” Mr Trump is quoted as saying in a letter sent late on Friday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, US media report.

Not long after Mr Linick’s dismissal was announced, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee said Mr Linick had opened an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“This firing is the outrageous act of a president trying to protect one of his most loyal supporters, the secretary of state, from accountability,” Eliot Engel, a Democrat, said in a statement.

“I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo. Mr Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation.”

Mr Engel did not provide any further details about the content of this investigation into Mr Pompeo.

Congressional aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, have been quoted in different media as saying that Mr Linick was examining complaints that Mr Pompeo may have improperly used staff and asked them to perform personal tasks.
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Mr Linick, a former prosecutor, was appointed by Mr Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, to oversee spending and detect mismanagement at the state department.

‘Retaliation’

Democrats have been reacting to the move. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Mr Linick was “punished for honourably performing his duty to protect the constitution and our national security”.

“The president must cease his pattern of reprisal and retaliation against the public servants who are working to keep Americans safe, particularly during this time of global emergency,” she added in a statement.

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, said the Senate Foreign Relations Committee needed to learn more about the dismissal.

This is the latest in a series of dismissals of independent government watchdogs.

Last month, Mr Trump dismissed Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the intelligence community.

Mr Atkinson first alerted Congress to a whistleblower complaint that led to Mr Trump’s impeachment trial.

Source: BBC

White House plans to disband virus task force

US President Donald Trump has confirmed the White House coronavirus task force will be winding down, with Vice-President Mike Pence suggesting it could be disbanded within weeks.

“We are bringing our country back,” Mr Trump said during a visit to a mask-manufacturing factory in Arizona.

New confirmed infections per day in the US currently top 20,000, and daily deaths exceed 1,000.

US health officials warn the virus may spread as businesses begin to reopen.

The US currently has 1.2 million confirmed coronavirus infections and more than 70,000 related deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, which is tracking the pandemic.

What did President Trump say?

During a visit to the plant in Phoenix after weeks holed up at the White House, Mr Trump told journalists: “Mike Pence and the task force have done a great job, but we’re now looking at a little bit of a different form, and that form is safety and opening. And we’ll have a different group probably set up for that.”

The president – who wore safety goggles but no face mask during his tour of the facility – was asked if it was “mission accomplished”, and he said: “No, not at all. The mission accomplished is when it’s over.”

Critics have accused the president of sacrificing Americans’ public health in his eagerness to reopen the US economy ahead of his re-election battle in November.

In Arizona on Tuesday, Mr Trump said that Democrats were hoping his coronavirus policy would fail “so they can win the election”.

Acknowledging a human cost to the plans, Mr Trump told reporters: “I’m not saying anything is perfect, and yes, will some people be affected? Yes.

“Will some people be affected badly? Yes. But we have to get our country open and we have to get it open soon.”

However, it will be up to individual states to determine how they reopen.

Some Democratic governors in badly hit states have been cautious, calling for more testing and other safeguards before easing lockdowns. Other states, many led by Republicans in the south and mid-west, have already begun lifting restrictions.

The task force was set up on 29 January. Mr Pence became its chairman four weeks later and its members include more than 20 experts and leading administration officials. The White House said the task force’s duty was to “lead the administration’s efforts to monitor, contain and mitigate the spread of the virus” and provide the public with information.

Mr Trump’s once-daily task force briefings became increasingly scarce after he was widely condemned by the medical community for pondering at the podium last month whether injecting bleach into people might kill the virus.

Dr Deborah Birx has been the task force’s response co-ordinator. The president was asked on Tuesday whether she and another high-profile member, Dr Anthony Fauci, would still be involved in efforts to address the coronavirus.

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“They will be and so will other doctors and so will other experts in the field,” the president said.

What did the vice-president say?

Mr Pence earlier on Tuesday told reporters in a briefing that the task force could soon be disbanded.

He said the Trump administration was “starting to look at the Memorial Day [late May] window, early June window as a time when we could begin to transition back to having our agencies begin to manage, begin to manage our national response in a more traditional manner”.

He said it was “a reflection of the tremendous progress we’ve made as a country”.

Mr Pence has led the task force, which reports to the president and co-ordinates with medical institutes, political staff and state governors. The group also consulted medical experts to formulate national guidelines on social distancing.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany later tweeted that the president “will continue his data-driven approach towards safely re-opening”.

 

Lives and livelihoods

The White House’s shift in focus from the public health aspect of the coronavirus pandemic to its economic impact continues.

For more than a month, the task force had been the public face of the administration’s response to the crisis, even though President Trump sometimes veered far from the topic at hand during its press briefings.

When the president wasn’t talking, however, government public health officials led the conversation.

Now, it appears, the officials setting the agenda will be ones more concerned with jobs, businesses and the fiscal health of the nation – even though the number of cases of the virus throughout the US continues to increase.

There is growing frustration among the president’s core supporters, however, with government shelter-in-place orders. Several states, encouraged by the president, have already begun to ease restrictions, even though they have not met White House guidelines for when to do so.

Those recommendations were set by the current coronavirus task force, of course. And the “different group” in a “different form” that replaces it, as the president describes, may have other ideas.

Trump warns US death toll could hit 100,000

US President Donald Trump has warned that as many as 100,000 people could die of coronavirus in the US.

Speaking at a two-hour virtual “town hall”, Mr Trump also denied that his administration had acted too slowly.

More than 68,000 people have already died with Covid-19 in the US.

But Mr Trump expressed optimism about the development of a vaccine, suggesting one could be ready by the end of this year – although experts believe it will take 12 to 18 months.

“I think we’re going to have a vaccine by the end of the year,” he told Fox News. “The doctors would say, well you shouldn’t say that. I’ll say what I think… I think we’ll a vaccine sooner rather than later.”

Among the experts to disagree with this optimistic estimate are Dr Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, and England’s Chief Medical Officer, Chris Whitty.

Dr Fauci has previously said a vaccine will take up to 18 months to develop, while Professor Whitty said last month the chances of having an effective vaccine or other treatment within the next year were “incredibly small”.
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The town hall – or community meeting featuring viewers’ questions – was intended to relaunch Mr Trump’s presidential campaign in lieu of rallies.

President Trump also rejected claims that his administration had failed to act quickly enough at the start of the outbreak, saying: “We did the right thing.”

Instead, he again accused China for failing to stop the virus spreading: “I think they made a horrible mistake, and they didn’t want to admit it. We wanted to go in. They didn’t want us there.”

Mr Trump also laid some of the blame at the door of US intelligence officials, accusing them of failing to raise concerns about the outbreak until 23 January.

However, US broadcasters CNN and ABC report that the president’s intelligence briefings mentioned the coronavirus as early as 3 January.

Coronavirus: President Trump’s testing claims fact-checked

In a video clip posted by the White House on Twitter, President Trump has made several claims about testing policy in the United States, an issue over which his administration has faced significant criticism.

We’ve been checking these claims out.

Claim one

“The testing has been incredible now, and to a level that nobody’s seen… we have tested more than all countries put together.”

President Trump says the US has carried out more tests than every other country in the world combined.

The latest data shows that a total of 6,231,182 tests have been carried out in the US.

This is more than any other single country.

However, it’s nowhere near as many as the rest of the world combined.

Just adding together the totals of Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK gives you more than the US.

The US also still lags behind several other nations in terms of testing per capita.

Exact testing comparisons can be difficult as countries count testing in different ways.

But looking at the latest data available, the US has carried out about one test in every 53 people. Italy has performed around one in every 30 people, Spain around one in every 45, and Australia around one in every 45.

Claim two

“We had old-fashioned tests that didn’t work – they were really obsolete – they didn’t work, they were broken.”

President Trump says his administration had a “broken” test that didn’t work when first testing for the coronavirus.
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He has previously said: “We inherited a broken test – the whole thing was broken.”

The US did have faulty tests initially after the White House conceded the first batch sent out by the government’s central health body produced inconclusive results.

However, these tests were introduced in February under the Trump administration so they weren’t inherited or old.

In early March, the White House conceded the US did not have enough testing kits, but since then it has significantly ramped up testing, with the total number increasing six fold since the start of April.

Claim three

“Millions of tests – and the highest quality test.”

When President Trump talks about the “highest quality” test, it’s not exactly clear what he’s referring to. He has previously said the US tests are “better” than those used in other countries.

However, when it comes to antigen tests – tests that tell you if someone currently has coronavirus – the accuracy tends to be similar across the globe.

The Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, an independent evaluator of tests, based in Switzerland, says its results “see equally good performance from companies in multiple countries”.

Antibody tests – which tell you if someone has previously had Covid-19 – have so far proved unreliable and have not been widely rolled out. So, the “millions of tests” must be the antigen ones.

There is no clear evidence that these tests in the US are any better or worse than in any other country.

Trump contradicts US Intelligence report

US President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that he has seen evidence that the novel coronavirus originated in a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

Asked if he has seen anything that gives him a “high degree of confidence” that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was where the virus had originated from, Trump replied: “Yes, I have.”

His remarks came hours after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) said the US intelligence community does not believe the coronavirus is “manmade or genetically modified.”

Speaking at a White House press conference, Trump attacked the World Health Organization, claiming it is serving China’s interests as the coronavirus continues to spread around the world.

“The World Health Organization should be ashamed of themselves because they are like a public relations agency for China,” Trump told reporters.

He said the US pays the WHO almost $500 million a year while China pays only $38 million and claimed the organization has failed to save lives.

“They should not be making excuses when people make horrible mistakes that are causing hundreds of thousands of people around the world to die,” said Trump.
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Trump accuses the international body of mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus and cut funding to the WHO in mid-April.

He said the WHO is “China-centric,” maintaining it had been the source of poor information for governments worldwide, particularly its opposition to countries closing their borders to China after the virus emerged there in December.

The coronavirus continues to spread in the US, claiming over 62,000 lives. More than one million are infected, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

After originating in Wuhan, China last December, COVID-19 has spread to at least 187 countries and regions. Europe and the US are currently the worst-hit.

The pandemic has killed over 232,800 worldwide, with more than 3.27 million infections, while recoveries now exceed one million.

Trump draws up plan to punish China

The Trump administration is formulating a long-term plan to punish China on multiple fronts for the coronavirus pandemic, injecting a rancorous new element into a critical relationship already on a steep downward slide.

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The effort matches but goes far beyond an election campaign strategy of blaming Beijing to distract from President Donald Trump’s errors in predicting and handling the crisis, which has now killed more than 60,000 Americans.
Multiple sources inside the administration say that there is an appetite to use various tools, including sanctions, canceling US debt obligations and drawing up new trade policies, to make clear to China, and to everyone else, where they feel the responsibility lies.
“We have to get the economy going again, we have to be careful about how we do this,” said one administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“But we will find ways to show the Chinese that their actions are completely reprehensible.”
The intelligence community is meanwhile coming under enormous pressure from the administration, with senior officials pushing to find out whether the virus escaped into the public from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, two sources familiar with the frustrations said.
In an unprecedented move, the intelligence community issued a statement saying it was surging resources on the matter as it would in any crisis.
“The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan,” the statement said.
CNN reported earlier this month that the government was looking into the theory that the virus originated in the lab but hadn’t yet able to corroborate it. Earlier this month Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the weight of evidence suggests the virus was of natural origin.
The New York Times reported Thursday that officials were pressuring intelligence analysts to find information supporting the idea.
“I think we will figure it out,” an administration official said, when asked if it was possible the origin of the virus would never be established.
The US-China clash is brewing amid growing suspicion inside the administration over China’s rising strategic challenge and fury that the virus destroyed an economy seen as Trump’s passport to a second term.
“I am very confident that the Chinese Communist Party will pay a price for what they did here, certainly from the United States,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week.
The building confrontation comes as both sides seek to exploit an already fragmented geopolitical environment already shaken by their rivalry that has been thoroughly fragmented by the pandemic.
In the long term, it threatens to cause uneasy choices for US Asian allies who are also keen not to antagonize the giant in their backyard. And the growing tension could have significant repercussions for the global economy as the US seeks to wean itself off supply chains dominated by China.
There are serious questions to be addressed about China’s transparency in the early days of the outbreak in Wuhan and whether its autocratic system fostered an attempt to cover it up. The United States is not the only nation that wants answers amid a pandemic that has devastated the global economy and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
In response to building pressure, China has launched a propaganda effort to distract from its own culpability, including blaming US soldiers for importing the pathogen in remarks that infuriated Trump.

Administration sizes up options

Officials note that finding ways to punish China will be a sensitive business.
“We’ll get the timing right,” Pompeo said on Wednesday. In the extreme circumstances of the pandemic, China has the capacity to hit back at the United States making it “irresponsible” to drive too hard too early, officials say.
With the US afflicted by shortages of personal protective equipment, medical devices, biologic drugs and Chinese-made pharmaceuticals, it is vulnerable to short-term disruption in established supply chains amid a pandemic that has infected more than a million Americans.
Pompeo appeared to demonstrate this restraint last week when he was asked about new Chinese export controls that have prevented US medical supplies from getting to the US. In private, US officials are irate, but in public Pompeo used delicate language.
“The good news is we have seen China provide those resources. Sometimes they’re from US companies that are there in China, but we’ve had success,” Pompeo said.
“We are counting on China to continue to live up to its contractual obligations and international obligations to provide that assistance to us and to sell us those goods,” Pompeo said.
In the longer term, especially if Trump wins reelection, the US effort will likely treat offshore supply chains as national security priorities rather than as simply economic questions.
“If we fail to do that in the face of this crisis, we will have failed this country and all future generations of Americans. It is that clear,” Trump economic advisor Peter Navarro told CNN.

A tense turn in US-China relations

The toughened posture toward China is consistent with Trump’s rejection of the principles of Sino-US ties that date back to President Richard Nixon’s courting of the then-closed communist state in the early 1970s.
Trump says that the process of ushering Beijing into the world economy in an effort to avoid a clash between the dominant power, the US, and China, the rising one — known as the Thucydides Trap — has been a disaster.
He has argued that Washington has emboldened and enriched a foe with nearly three times its population and that has “raped” US industry in the flight of blue-collar jobs abroad.
It was a message that was electrified Trump supporters in the decaying US rustbelt in 2016 and is one on which he is relying to brand his presumptive Democratic opponent as a China-appeasing tool of the foreign policy elite in November.
“This is the natural way to go. It’s the only way to go. It is pretty much the main campaign theme,” said an official familiar with the campaign’s messaging efforts focused on China.
The administration’s national security strategy — which was laid out in 2017 — also casts China as a competitor and a revisionist power.
But as is often the case, the administration’s hard line is undermined or tempered by the President’s own unorthodox personality and approach to his job.
Trump’s over-personalized approach to world leaders and his fixation with preserving his friendship with Xi is also directly contradicting his political and diplomatic strategy.
“We are not happy with China,” Trump said Tuesday but his statements are undercut by the multiple times he praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for his handling of the pandemic earlier this year, apparently partly motivated by a desire to keep a US-China trade deal, one of the few limited wins of his administration, on track.
One disadvantage of Trump’s insistence on forging friendships with strongman leaders is that it leaves national relationships more susceptible to any fractures in personal ties.
Both Trump and Xi are the most aggressive, nationalistic leaders of their two nations in decades, who are keen to flex personal power in a way that can cause volatile foreign relations.
And the US President is not alone in facing domestic incentives to initiate confrontation. While China’s Communist Party leaders enjoy absolute power, they are susceptible to internal political pressures — especially as they try, like Trump, to deflect from their own virus missteps.
In its own disinformation offensive, Beijing has blamed US troops for bringing the novel coronavirus to China. On Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang accused “American politicians” of telling barefaced lies about the pandemic.
“They have only one objective: to try to shirk responsibility for their own epidemic and prevention and control measures and divert public attention,” Geng said.
The heated rhetoric over the virus threatens to unleash a chain reaction of mistrust and tension that worsens tensions between the US and China exacerbated by Trump’s trade war, territorial flashpoints including in the South China Sea and the global US campaign against the Huawei communications giant.
Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned on CNN last week that the building heat was dangerous.
“Frankly, it is each side pushing each other’s hyper nationalism buttons and we are getting nowhere,” she said.

The US/China freeze

Relations with China have plummeted in recent years, amid rising tensions over trade, Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and its rise to challenge the US strategically.
Trump’s decision to freeze funding for the World Health Organization, based on claims it was too solicitous from China, could also further undercut US influence, especially in Asia where the US withdrawal from the the Trans Pacific Partnership was a big win for Beijing.
China does have a record of overplaying its hand and driving regional powers back into the US orbit. The Obama administration exploited such a misstep with its Asia pivot.
Recent failures such as flawed personal protective equipment sent to Europe have tarnished Beijing’s coronavirus diplomacy. Racist treatment of Africans in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou has had a similar effect. And despite its efforts to change the story, China may never escape the notoriety of being the incubator for the disease and claims its autocratic system was responsible for critical delays in tackling the virus.
So there is fertile ground for the Trump administration to exploit in its effort to punish China. But its own domineering attitude in the Trump years and a poorly managed effort to combat Covid-19 challenge the credibility of its efforts.
“There is really nobody who does not want to see China held to account for the political coverup attempt, which slowed down international awareness and allowed the virus to spread. There is a resentment around the world,” said Danny Russel, an Obama-era State Department official in charge Asia Pacific policy. “But I think you would be hard pressed to find a political leader in Asia or Europe who does not believe this anti-China push by the Trump administration is an entirely a political move. They are trying to deflect blame for the catastrophic incompetence of the administration.”

Coronavirus: US confirms one million cases

There have now been more than one million confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. More than 56,000 have died from COVID-19-related complications.

The first known U.S. case of COVID-19 was reported on January 21. On April 10, there were more than 500,000 cases, the New York Times reported.

Some reports said the true number of infections may be much higher. The one million figure does not include untold thousands of Americans who contracted the virus but were not tested, either because they did not show symptoms or because of a persistent national testing shortage.

Some disease researchers have estimated that the true number of infections may be somewhere around 10 times the known number, and preliminary testing of how many people have antibodies to the virus seems to support that view.

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But as the country’s death toll, now more than 56,000, continues to grow and as the pandemic’s economic fallout continues to mount, the one million case benchmark helped show the scale of human suffering that the virus has wrought.

Roughly one in every 330 people in the United States has now tested positive for the virus. And even as the virus has showed signs of retreating in some hard-hit places, including Seattle and New Orleans, other parts of the country, including Chicago and Los Angeles, continued to report persistently high numbers of new infections. More than 1,300 new cases were announced on Monday alone in Cook County, Illinois, along with nearly 1,000 in Los Angeles County.

Though the country’s urban centres were hit worst early in the pandemic, parts of rural America are now experiencing the most alarming rates of growth. Many of those outbreaks have been tied to outbreaks at meatpacking plants or other workplaces.

What Buhari, Trump discussed on phone

President Muhammadu Buhari Tuesday afternoon received a telephone call from American President, Donald Trump, during which the two leaders commiserated with each other on fatalities in their countries, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

They also shared ideas on how to successfully combat the health emergency.

President Buhari expressed condolences to the government and people of the United States over the fatalities recorded, and equally expressed worry at the high rate of deaths recorded across the world.

The associated negative impacts of the pandemic on the world’s economy also came up for discussion.

The Nigerian President lauded his American counterpart for the various initiatives adopted by his government to contain the further spread of the virus across the United States.
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He indicated Nigeria’s readiness to cooperate with the United States to fight this common unseen enemy.

President Buhari informed that Nigeria had taken a number of proactive measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 across the country.

The President welcomed the valuable friendship and expressed appreciation to President Trump for reaching out at this time.

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