Coronavirus cases are climbing in Midwest states with previously low infections. / Mark Meadows / UPDATES
Experts also see worrying trends emerging in major East Coast and Midwest cities, and they anticipate major outbreaks in college towns as classes resume in August.
The University of Texas at Austin notified students that parties are prohibited when the campus reopens in three weeks. The school cited city health guidelines prohibiting groups larger than 10 people and requiring a mask when out in public.
President Trump continued his push to fully reopen schools, even as some of the nation’s largest districts are delaying in-person instruction amid continuing spread of the virus. “Ideally, we want to open those schools. We want to open them,” Trump said during a White House news conference
Trump also said the United States is doing much better dealing with the virus than most other countries — a claim inconsistent with the facts — and accused the news media of trying to make him and the country look “as bad as possible.”
The head of the World Health Organization warned “there’s no silver bullet at the moment, and there might never be.” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday that “a number of coronavirus vaccines are now in Phase 3 clinical trials, and we all hope to have a number of effective vaccines that can help prevent people from infection.”
He cautioned, however, that “of course there are concerns that we may not have a vaccine that may work,” or that its protection would be short term.
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White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows drew a hard line during the talks.
“In private, [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi began to refer to Meadows as ‘the Enforcer,’ the implication being he was there to ensure [Treasury Secretary Steven] Mnuchin didn’t make a deal with the Democrats,” Seung Min Kim, Erica Werner and Josh Dawsey report. “Unlike in previous rounds, when Pelosi held out for a better deal for Democrats and ultimately forced major concessions from Republicans, this time administration officials, led by Meadows, walked away. Now, Democrats are facing questions about their tactics and whether playing hardball will continue to work when someone like Meadows is intimately involved. … Democrats say it was Meadows more than anyone else who was responsible for the failure to deliver on this round of talks. They had successfully negotiated four bipartisan bills in March and April, mostly before Meadows had officially joined the White House as chief of staff.”
This nugget from the story illustrates how little mutual trust existed between the White House and Democrats: Irritated by leaks, Pelosi instituted a rule forbidding anyone in the negotiations from bringing in their phones, so that talks couldn’t be recorded. But Meadows refused to surrender his device upon entering Pelosi’s office last Wednesday, insisting he had an important call to take. Pelosi told Meadows that the phone had to go or he did. She suggested that Meadows’s aide exit the room with Meadows’s phone and alert him when the call arrived. Meadows said the assistant had to stay to take notes. Finally, Mnuchin intervened, offering up a Treasury Department staffer to exit the room with Meadows’s phone and tell him when the call came through. Meadows accepted that solution — while insisting to Pelosi that he was not the source of any leaks.
“Meadows, 61, was never a legislative guru during his seven years on Capitol Hill — a tenure that was marked more by his willingness to wage ideological internecine warfare against other Republicans. … As a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, Meadows … endorsed an ultimately futile strategy in 2013 to force a government shutdown over funding for the Affordable Care Act. He served on committees that tended to showcase partisanship, rather than consensus. … During one meeting with senior Senate GOP appropriators, Meadows acknowledged that he was in an awkward position of advocating for a deal he would not have supported but that his task now was to help Trump strike an agreement. … ‘If Mark Meadows were still alive, he’d be appalled at the amount of spending going on around here,’ Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) quipped at a closed-door party lunch on Aug. 5. … Everyone laughed, including Meadows.”
The global count of confirmed coronavirus cases surpassed 20 million.
“Worryingly, that number represents double the infections that had been reported as recently as late June. After the first coronavirus cases were found in China in December, it took roughly six months for the worldwide count to reach 10 million. Another 10 million cases have been detected in the past six weeks alone,” Antonia Farzan reports. “Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization, noted in a Monday video message that the global death toll was poised to surpass 750,000 this week. Behind such milestones is ‘a great deal of pain and suffering,’ he said, adding that it was ‘never too late to turn the outbreak around.’ ‘My message is crystal clear: suppress, suppress, suppress the virus,’ he said. ‘If we suppress the virus effectively, we can safely open up societies.’”
Millions of members and followers on Facebook support QAnon conspiracy theory,”
“An internal investigation by Facebook has uncovered thousands of groups and pages, with millions of members and followers, that support the QAnon conspiracy theory,” NBC News reports. “The top 10 groups identified in the investigation collectively contain more than 1 million members, with totals from more top groups and pages pushing the number of members and followers past 3 million. … The company is considering an option similar to its handling of anti-vaccination content, which is to reject advertising and exclude QAnon groups and pages from search results and recommendations.”
Adm has pushed thousands of migrant children back to their home countries
ProPublica reports that the Trump administration has pushed thousands of migrant children back to their home countries since March without legal screenings or protection, citing the risk that they could be carrying the coronavirus: “But by the time the children are boarded on planes home, they’ve already been tested for the virus — and proven not to have it. ICE’s comprehensive testing appears to undermine the rationale for the mass expulsion policy.”
- New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) plans to bring 700,000 students back to school buildings next month. Under the plan, approved by the state, students who opted for in-person instruction will still do much of their learning virtually and will go to the classroom only on certain days to prevent crowding. (Moriah Balingit)
