7/15/20
Sidelined by the White House and harshly criticized in an extraordinary op-ed from one of President Trump’s top advisers, Anthony S. Fauci — the nation’s top infectious-disease expert — said in an interview published Wednesday that the country needs to focus on a surging virus “rather than these games people are playing.” “We’ve got to almost reset this and say, ‘Okay, let’s stop this nonsense,' ” he said after being asked by the Atlantic to state “the truth about the federal response to the pandemic” in the United States. “We’ve got to figure out, How can we get our control over this now, and, looking forward, how can we make sure that next month, we don’t have another example of California, Texas, Florida, and Arizona?”
Hospital capacity in several hard-hit states is running low as officials scramble to keep their expanding outbreaks from spinning even further out of control. Health experts and hospital officials warn that an abrupt change in how the Trump administration requires them to report coronavirus data will increase the burden on facilities already strained by the pandemic. Support for mask mandates continued to grow a day after another of the country’s top health officials said universal face-covering could bring covid-19 “under control” in the United States. Alabama and the city of Tulsa mandated masks on Wednesday, while Walmart, Kroger and Kohl’s announced they would require all shoppers to wear masks.
