Sav mayor blasts Trump over coronavirus
BERTEL MOORE, chairman of the Westmoreland Municipal Corporation and mayor of Savannala-Mar, has said that US President Donald Trump is out of touch with the realities as it relates to the deadly coronavirus (COVID-19).
“The great [United States] America … the president did not know how serious this [coronavirus] thing is, and it makes me wonder if he is ignorant of the things that are happening in this world,” said Moore while speaking during Thursday’s monthly meeting of the Westmoreland Municipal Corporation.
“It was the same thing when they [world leaders and climate change experts] spoke about climate change. He said nothing goes like that, but he is coming to see truth starting to reveal to the world,” the Savanna-la-Mar mayor said.
In the face of President Trump’s poor handling of climate change issues and the rapid reach of the coronavirus,
Moore made it clear that he was not impressed with the president.
“He is not in tune with what is happening in the world,” said Moore.
According to Moore, the world is in turmoil at this time, and while Jamaica has recorded just two cases of the coronavirus, the country needs to do all it can to contain its spread.
Interestingly,
Moore said Trump appointee, top US envoy to Jamaica, Ambassador Donald Tapia, who visited with him last week, is more in touch with what is going. “I had the US ambassador with me last Friday, and he is in touch with what is happening” said Moore. To date, there are 1,603 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States, of which 40 persons have died and 15 have recovered fully. One per cent of the affected cohort are being considered as serious or critical, while the other 99 per cent, which is approximately 1,548, are deemed mild conditions. Since the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, last December, more than 140,000 people have been infected and approximately 5,000 have died. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared this outbreak of the COVID-19 as a pandemic, pointing out that this is the first pandemic caused by a coronavirus.
The WHO has said that having described COVID-19 as a pandemic does not change its assessment of the threat posed by this virus and that it doesn’t change the role that it will play along with what countries should do.