The White House’s coronavirus task force has all but vanished from public view as President Donald Trump pushes Americans to put the outbreak behind them and resume normal social and economic life.
The task force was once a staple of Trump’s response to the pandemic. From March 4 until late April, the panel held nearly daily, televised briefings, many headlined by Trump.The last briefing was April 27, when Trump predicted the U.S. would suffer between 60,000 and 70,000 deaths from the outbreak. More than 107,000 Americans have died from the virus.
In Kansas, there are 10,393 confirmed cases and 232 deaths.
The task force is now reduced to weekly closed-door meetings with Vice President Mike Pence. While it hasn’t been formally mothballed, the task force’s move to the back burner comes as Trump publicly cheers states that are reopening their economies and brushes aside a persistently high number of new infections and deaths every day. There were nearly 20,000 new cases of the disease and almost 1,000 deaths on Wednesday.
“To maintain the health and safety of our society, we must also maintain the health of our economy,” Trump said last week.
“This is deeply concerning because there’s almost a sense coming out of the White House that the pandemic is somehow over,” said Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute at Harvard University. “It’s like the third inning of a baseball game, and we’re down 8-2, and the manager concludes the game is over, says we’ve won, and walks out.”
