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As President Trump touts progress amid the coronavirus pandemic at scripted, on-message briefings this week, top members of the coronavirus task force are privately – and publicly – expressing concern about burgeoning outbreaks across the country.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday that the US is “certainly not at the end of the game,” with a series of baseball metaphors.
“I’m not even sure we’re halfway through. I mean, obviously, if you want to do a score I don’t want to get too cute about it but certainly we are not winning the game right now, we are not leading it,” Fauci said.
And in audio obtained by journalism nonprofit Center for Public Integrity, coronavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx privately told a group of state and local health officials about a concerning rise in cases in a series of cities, warning the officials to take mitigation action as soon as they see signs of percent positivity increasing.
“There are cities that are lagging behind and we have new increases in Miami, New Orleans, Las Vegas, San Jose, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, Cleveland, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Columbus and Baltimore, so we’re tracking this very closely. We’re working with the state officials to make sure we’re responding together, but when you first see that increased test positivity, that is when to start the mitigation efforts,” she said during the Wednesday call.
Birx continued: “I know it may look small, and you may say that only went from five to five and a half, and we’re going to wait and see what happens. If you wait another three to four, even five, days, you’ll start to see a dramatic increase in cases. So finding and tracing those very early individuals is really critical.”
Birx told the officials in places experiencing increased test positivity to “(make) sure they’re being aggressive about mitigation efforts,” noting that the administration provides governors with a weekly report with clear recommendations for mitigation.
One such report, also obtained by CPI last week, recommended that 18 states in the task force-defined “red zone” for cases should roll back reopening measures amid surging cases. Those reports are not made publicly available.
Birx told the officials there are “small glimmers of decreasing test positivity in many of our metros in Texas and of course in Phoenix,” but the task force has “deep concerns about specific metros, of course in Florida, and spreading epidemic in California into the Central Valley.”
A White House spokesperson said Birx’s comments were in line with Trump’s briefing remarks on Wednesday.
“This doesn’t deviate from what the President said yesterday. The virus is still with us, we have some states and metros with significant outbreaks, and we must take this incredibly seriously,” deputy press secretary Judd Deere told CNN.
But Trump cherry-picked some of the more hopeful aspects of the pandemic in his briefings, and declined to appear alongside his top public health officials, telling reporters that appearing solo at the podium was a “very concise way of doing it.”
