Politico: Coronavirus Cases are Plunging, And That's... Apparently Some Kind of Political Danger for Trump

Politico spins Trump's success as Trump's coming failure.

Coronavirus infections are down in nearly every state. That could either give President Donald Trump just what he needs to prime his reelection odds or become another missed opportunity to capitalize on a lull during the pandemic.

The positive trends are real. Covid-19 cases have been falling since late July, including in several battleground states. Hospitalizations have dropped 37 percent in the last month and the daily death count is leveling off.

But that doesn’t mean the pandemic is over, even if Trump and his team portray it that way.

The circumstances create a moment to reinforce public health measures like testing, tracing and social distancing that could finally bring the outbreak to more manageable proportions, while the world waits for a vaccine or new treatments.

Another Political article talks about the "peril" that plummeting infection rates pose for Trump.

They decide to, um, prove that falling infection rates are just a mirage -- by rebutting actual, real current numbers with... more "models" about the future:

Morgan Stanley projects at least 6.5 million U.S. infections by October, and the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation on Thursday predicted more than 260,000 people could be dead from the virus by Election Day, a 44 percent increase from current levels.

Politico then attempts to blame Trump for the fact that people can't return to their normal lives -- despite the fact that Trump is the one fighting for a return to normalcy, and Poltico's political allies and sources and leakers are the ones fighting to keep life as miserable as possible:

Trump's focus on schools also suggests that the White House knows declining infection numbers aren't enough.

All the surveys show people are still frustrated they can't return to their normal lives, said Robert Blendon, director of the Harvard Opinion Research Program.

"He wouldn't be fighting so hard to make the schools open if he thought the [infection] numbers were enough," he said. "It's very measurable in people's lives. The president can't spin it."

Democrats and their client groups, like teachers' unions, are the ones fighting to keep life abnormal, but Trump "can't spin" the abnormality of current life?

I think someone's spinning here, but it's not Trump.

And up to 90% of the "covid cases" we have are so minor, so low in "viral load," that the person showing the infection does not even need to be isolated, because he just doesn't have enough virus in him to spread it.

According to The New York Times, potentially 90 percent of those who have tested positive for COVID-19 have such insignificant amounts of the virus present in their bodies that such individuals do not need to isolate nor are they candidates for contact tracing. Leading public health experts are now concerned that overtesting is responsible for misdiagnosing a huge number of people with harmless amounts of the virus in their systems.

"Most of these people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time," warns The Times.

So, if overtesting is causing "bottlenecks" that keep us from identifying contagious people in time, what does The New York Times believe the solution should be? More testing!

I'm sure the fact that up to 90% of covid cases might be, effectively, false positives is also a Lurking Peril for Trump.

posted by Ace at 01:00 PM

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