Surging coronavirus colors White House race in closing days

LUMBERTON, N.C. — President Donald Trump assured supporters packed shoulder to shoulder Saturday that “we’re rounding the turn” and mocked challenger Joe Biden for raising alarms about the pandemic. Meanwhile, Biden bemoaned to a smaller gathering the need to campaign at a distance but said he understood the public health reasons behind it.

With coronavirus infections reaching their highest peak of the pandemic just as the election headed into the home stretch, Trump and Biden took starkly different approaches to the public health crisis in appealing for votes in battleground states.

“We don’t want to become superspreaders,” Biden told supporters at a “drive-in” rally Saturday in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, picking up a term that has been used to describe the Rose Garden event in late September in which Trump announced his Supreme Court nominee. More than two dozen people linked to the White House have contracted COVID-19 since that gathering.

In Lumberton, North Carolina, his tongue firmly in cheek, Trump called Biden “an inspiring guy” for raising alarm about the pandemic. The president said that he watched Biden’s Bucks County rally as he flew to North Carolina and sarcastically observed that it appeared attendees, who were in their cars, weren’t properly socially distancing.

“You know why we have cases?” Trump said. “’Cause we test so much. And in many ways, it’s good. And in many ways, it’s foolish. In many ways, OK? In many ways it’s very foolish.”

Trump continued to criticize Biden for saying during Thursday’s debate that the country was headed for a “dark winter” because of the pandemic — the scenario of a surge in infections that health experts warned about for months. Nearly 224,000 people in the United States have died and more than 83,000 infections were reported on Friday alone, a record.