Pandemic still rages
This editorial was excerpted from The Washington Post. E very handbook for a public health crisis emphasizes that open, transparent communication is extremely important. Officials must maintain credibility and public trust. They must not “over-reassure” and should be candid about risks and unexpected events. By this measure, Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House task force on the coronavirus pandemic, has been a case study in irresponsibility.
His op-ed published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal rightly called attention to some progress in fighting the virus, but also included a burst of happy talk. Pence declared, “We are winning the fight against the invisible enemy” and took the media to task for worrying about a second wave.
“Such panic is overblown,” Pence said. “The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different.”
Pence characterized the approach of President Donald Trump as a “success” and “a cause for celebration, not the media’s fear mongering.”
True, a second wave of the pandemic has not yet begun — but the first wave is still dangerously rolling. Pence’s soothsaying came the day after nine states — Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina and Texas — either reported new single-day highs in case counts or set a record for seven-day averages. Hospitalizations in Texas are now at a peak.
The pandemic, which struck early in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest, is now racing across the Sun Belt.
Pence and Trump earlier this week misleadingly claimed that higher case counts are the result of more testing. In fact, while there is more testing, data show positive test rates over the past 14 days are rising, too: 7.9% in Texas, 11.3% South Carolina, 14.6% in Alabama and 17.7% in Arizona. The United States has been stuck at more than 20,000 new cases a day for nearly three months.
Pence has never shied from over-reassurance. “We’re ready for anything,” he proclaimed March 2. Since then, 119,348 Americans have died.
The pandemic is still raging. Try as they might to spin a recovery story, Pence and Trump destroy their own credibility by ignoring reality. The American people know this is not “cause for celebration.”