Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Official notes virus concerns, says signs of progress seen
WASHINGTON — Adm. Brett Giroir, who serves as the nation’s coronavirus testing czar, on Tuesday acknowledged the gravity of the outbreak while offering notes of optimism and calling on Americans to keep wearing masks.
Separately, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he’ll begin to roll out details of a new covid-19 relief package to senators as soon as next week. He suggested it will include funding for school reopenings, some unemployment benefits and money for health care providers.
Giroir, a top member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said on NBC’s
“Today” that “none of us lie” to the public and that while kids need to be back in school, “we have to get the virus under control.”
Giroir’s comments came a day after President Donald Trump shared a Twitter post from a former game show host who accused government medical experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others, of “lying.”
Asked whether CDC experts and other doctors are lying, Giroir acknowledged that mistakes have been made and that public guidance is updated when more is learned about the virus, “but none of us lie. We are completely transparent with the American people.”
“None of us feel comfortable. Nobody’s doing a victory lap. We are all very concerned,” Giroir said, citing outbreaks in Texas, California, Florida and Arizona in particular. He said, however, that there are early indicators that the rates of positive tests have leveled off or fallen in those jurisdictions.
“These are the early indicators that we’re turning the corner,” Giroir said. “This doesn’t mean we’ve turned the corner, and I want everybody to really understand — you’ve got to physically distance, wear your mask, avoid bars, close bars in those hot areas, reduce restaurant capacity. If we keep doing those things, those early indicators will turn into successes for us.”
California on Monday
closed indoor dining and bars once more, and its two biggest school districts said they would only offer remote learning.
“There is a way to get children back to school safely; we all need to be on board to try to do that,” Giroir said. But “we’ve got to get the virus under control more in the community. That makes everything much more easy as we approach the school year.”
Despite a rise in new cases, the U.S. is “in a much different place than we were several months ago, a much better place,” Giroir said. About 63,000 people are hospitalized, down from about 85,000, while a smaller share of them are on ventilators, he said.
The mortality rate has fallen across all age groups, he added. “But we’re still very concerned because as hospitalizations go up, we would expect deaths to also go up,” he said.
FAUCI CRITICIZED
“We haven’t even begun to see the end of it yet,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said Monday in a talk with the dean of Stanford’s medical school, calling for a “step back” in reopenings.
Last week, Fauci contradicted Trump about the severity of the outbreak during a FiveThirtyEight podcast. While Trump contends his administration has done a great job against the pandemic, Fauci said: “As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don’t think you can say we’re doing great. I mean, we’re just not.”
Trump later said that Fauci had “made a lot of mistakes.” He pointed to Fauci’s early disagreement with him over the China travel ban and to the evolving guidance over the use of masks as scientists’ understanding of the virus improved — points the White House expanded on in statements to media outlets over the weekend.
Asked whether the president still had confidence in Fauci, a White House official on Monday insisted Trump did. The official said Fauci was regarded as “a valued voice” on the White House Coronavirus Task Force.
“I have a very good relationship with Dr. Fauci,” Trump told reporters Monday, calling him “a very nice person.” But, the president added, “I don’t always agree with him.”
That supportive message was not echoed by Peter Navarro, a top White House trade adviser who has been working on the coronavirus effort.
In an email, Navarro criticized Fauci to The Associated Press on Monday, saying the doctor has “a good bedside manner with the public but he has been wrong about everything I have ever interacted with him on.” That includes, he said, downplaying the early risk of the virus and expressing skepticism over the use of hydroxychloroquine.
Asked about criticism of Fauci, Giroir said: “None of us are always right. We admit that. I think we have a good relationship. The vice president listens to us all; we meet regularly,” he said. “We’re just going to keep our heads down, working together.”
DATA-GATHERING CHANGE
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the CDC and send all coronavirus patient information to a central database in Washington beginning today.
The new instructions were posted on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the CDC — will collect daily reports about the patients each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.
Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the task force in allocating scarce supplies such as personal protective gear and remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus.
But the Health and Human Services Department database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on CDC data to make projections and crucial decisions.
“Historically, CDC has been the place where public health data has been sent, and this raises questions about not just access for researchers but access for reporters, access for the public to try to better understand what is happening with the outbreak,” said Jen Kates, the director of global health and HIV policy with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
Michael Caputo, a Health and Human Services Department spokesman, called the CDC’s system inadequate and said the two systems would be linked.
The CDC will continue to make data public, he said.
“Today, the CDC still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data,” Caputo said. “America requires it in real time. The new, faster and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus, and the CDC, an operating division of HHS, will certainly participate in this streamlined all-of-government response. They will simply no longer control it.”
GOP LEGISLATION
In Washington, the emerging Republican relief package is expected to hit $1 trillion.
In recent days, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been reaching out to GOP senators ahead of negotiations with Democrats, who already approved a $3 trillion House bill.
McConnell, during a visit to a hospital in his home state of Kentucky, said the themes of the upcoming GOP bill will be children and schools, jobs and unemployment, and health care.
Congress is returning Monday for two weeks to consider new coronavirus relief.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned that, without a comprehensive federal strategy for the country, the virus and its economic toll will only persist.
“We can open our economy, we can open our schools, if we test, trace, treat, separate, mask, hygiene and the rest, but we have to make a national decision to do it,” the California Democrat said on CNN.
Central to the GOP proposal is a five-year liability shield that McConnell wants to extend to businesses, hospitals, schools and others to prevent lawsuits from those claiming injuries during the pandemic and the economic shutdown and reopening.
McConnell acknowledged that schools will need more money, especially as they reduce class sizes for social distancing and potentially stagger classroom shifts. Democrats have proposed $100 billion for schools in the House-passed bill.
This week, Vice President Mike Pence assured governors on a private conference call that he was working with congressional leaders on securing more education funds.
Republicans initially wanted to end a $600 weekly boost to unemployment insurance that’s set to expire at the end of this month. But McConnell said Tuesday that providing some unemployment insurance is “extremely important” for out-of-work Americans.
VACCINE TESTING
Even as researchers announced that the first vaccine tested in the U.S. had worked to boost patients’ immune systems, Florida surpassed its daily record for coronavirus deaths Tuesday.
Florida’s 132 additional deaths topped a state mark set just last week. The figure likely includes deaths from the past weekend that had not been previously reported.
The deaths raised the state’s seven-day average to 81 per day, more than double the figure of two weeks ago and now the second-highest in the United States behind Texas.
The figures were released just hours before the news about the experimental vaccine, developed by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc.
“No matter how you slice this, this is good news,” Fauci said of the vaccine testing.
Key final testing of the vaccine will start around July 27, tracking 30,000 people to prove if the shots really work in preventing infection. Tuesday’s announcement focused on findings since March in 45 volunteers.
With the virus spreading quickly in the southern and western U.S., one of the country’s top public health officials offered conflicting theories about what is driving the outbreak.
“We tried to give states guidance on how to reopen safely. … If you look critically, few states actually followed that guidance,” Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Tuesday in a livestream interview with the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Redfield said people in many states did not adopt social distancing and other measures because they hadn’t previously experienced an outbreak. But he went on to say, without explanation, that he didn’t believe the way those states handled reopening was necessarily behind the explosive rise in virus cases. He offered a theory that infected travelers from elsewhere in the country might have carried the virus with them around Memorial Day.
WEARING MASKS
Redfield urged Americans to wear masks to help contain the virus.
“At this critical juncture when covid-19 is resurging, broad adoption of cloth face coverings is a civic duty, a small sacrifice reliant on a highly effective low-tech solution that can help turn the tide,” he and two colleagues wrote in an editorial published online Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association.
In Britain, officials announced they will require people to wear masks starting July 24, after weeks of dismissing their value.
French President Emmanuel Macron said masks will be required by Aug. 1, after recent rave parties and widespread backsliding on social distancing raised concerns that the virus may be starting to rebound.
First lady Melania Trump also called on people to step up precautions.
“Even in the summer months, please remember to wear face coverings & practice social distancing,” she said Tuesday in a post on her Twitter account.
Elsewhere, officials in the Australian state of Queensland said those breaking quarantine rules could face up to six months in jail.
Disney officials announced that Hong Kong Disneyland Park is closing today until further notice after the city’s decision to ban public gatherings of more than four people.
And India, which has the third-most cases after the U.S. and Brazil, was rapidly nearing 1 million cases after more than 28,000 were reported Tuesday.
Information for this article was contributed by Darlene Superville, Jill Colvin, Jonathan Lemire, Zeke Miller,Terry Spencer, Lisa Mascaro, Matthew Daly and Adam Geller of The Associated Press; by Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg News; and by Sheryl Gay Stolberg of The New York Times.