Health News at Your Fingertips

Joe Biden released a scathing video about Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, as the president downplays the country’s recent surge in new cases.

The ad features some of Trump’s recent comments about the pandemic, including his claim that the US is “leading the world” in the fight against coronavirus.

As footage of Trump’s comments plays, a graphic shows the rising coronavirus death toll in the United States. More than 135,000 Americans have now died of coronavirus.

The US has confirmed 3,341,838 cases of coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tracker, meaning the US accounts for about a quarter of all cases worldwide.

The Guardian’s Vivian Ho reports from California:

California’s governor has ordered all counties across the state to shut down the indoor operations of several recently reopened sectors of the economy, including restaurants, bars, movie theaters and malls following a surge in new coronavirus cases.

The state has seen an average of 8,211 new cases over the past week, an uptick from the 7,876 average recorded the week before. The positivity rate has increased to 7.4%, up from 6.1% a few weeks prior.

“It’s incumbent on all of us to recognize, soberly, that covid-19 is not going away anytime soon,” said Gavin Newsom, California’s governor.

The order will affect places of worship, fitness centers, zoos, museums, entertainment centers and personal care centers. It comes as the state’s monitoring list of counties experiencing surges has grown to include 30 counties.

Trump once again said schools should be reopened, in response to a question about the new announcement that LA and San Diego schools will be entirely online when classes resume next month.

“Schools should be opened,” Trump said. “You’re losing a lot of lives by keeping things closed.”

The president and some of his advisers have repeatedly argued that it is more dangerous to keep students home from school due to the possibility of neglect or abuse.

However, many school districts have expressed alarm about the possibility of coronavirus spreading in the classroom when in-person instruction resumes.

Trump defended his highly controversial decision to commute the sentence of Roger Stone, the president’s former associate.

“I’m getting rave reviews for what I did for Roger Stone,” the president falsely claimed.

In reality, both Democrats and Republicans have criticized Trump’s decision to commute Stone’s sentence.

Republican senator Mitt Romney described Stone’s commutation as “unprecedented, historic corruption.”

Trump is now taking questions from reporters at his roundtable with families who have been positively impacted by police officers.

The first question was unsurprisingly about the White House’s recent criticism of Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert.

“I have a very good relationship with Dr Fauci,” Trump said, describing the senior official as a “very nice person.” But the president added, “I don’t always agree with him.”

Over the weekend, the White House ciriculated an unsigned memo casting some of Fauci’s past comments on coronavirus in a negative light, leading some of Trump’s critics to accuse the president of attacking science.

The LA and San Diego unified school districts, the two largest public school systems in California, has announced classes will be entirely online when the new school year starts next month.

“Both districts will continue planning for a return to in-person learning during the 2020-21 academic year, as soon as public health conditions allow,” the school districts said in a joint statement.

“Our leaders owe it to all of those impacted by the Covid-19 closures to increase the pace of their work. No one should use the delay in the reopening of classrooms as a reason to relax. The coronavirus has not taken a summer vacation, as many had hoped. Indeed, the virus has accelerated its attacks on our community.

“The federal government must provide schools with the resources we need to reopen in a responsible manner.”

The announcement makes the two California school districts the largest ones in the country so far to announce they will not resume in-person instruction this fall.

The announcement comes as Trump and some of his top advisers push schools to reopen next month, even though the president’s administration has sent mixed signals about how schools can safely welcome students back.

Trump is now holding a roundtable “with several Americans whose lives were helped, and in some cases saved, by law enforcement,” as the White House described it.

The president opened the roundtable by complaining about how police officers were being “very unfairly treated” in the wake of the polie killing of George Floyd.

The roundtable comes as the country experiences a national reckoning over racism and police brutality in response to the killing of Floyd and many other black Americans in police custody, including Breonna Taylor.

Attorney general William Barr ignored a question about Roger Stone’s commutation, a week after Barr described the former Trump associate’s sentence as “fair.”

Senior justice department officials previously intervened in the Stone case to push for a more lenient sentence for the president’s former associate, causing some of the prosecutors involved in the case to withdraw.

Last week, the justice department declined to side with Stone after he argued the start of his prison sentence should be delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence a day later.

Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has just concluded her briefing at the White House, during which she was repeatedly pressed on how the administration is responding to the recent surge in new cases of coronavirus.

McEnany defended the administration’s response to the pandemic by noting that the rate of coronavirus deaths has not risen as sharply as the rate of new cases in recent weeks.

However, public health experts have warned that the death toll often lags behind new cases as an indicator for the spread of the virus.

There is also evidence that the death toll is starting to rise. The seven-day average of daily coronavirus deaths now stands at 719, up from 471 a week ago.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany was pressed on Trump’s debunked claim that expanded coronavirus testing has caused the increased number of cases in the US.

A reporter noted the positivity rate of coronavirus tests has also climbed in many parts of the country, which cannot be explained by expanded testing.

McEnany replied by saying the administration has acknowledged there would be “embers” of the crisis that states had to grapple with, but she once again emphasized that more testing reveals more positive cases.

But it is difficult to view the recent surges in new cases as “embers” considering many states are seeing record levels of new infections. Florida reported more than 15,000 new cases in one day over the weekend.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany defended Trump’s highly controversial decision to commute the sentence of his former associate, Roger Stone.

McEnany described Stone’s commutation as a “very important moment for justice in this country,” criticizing the Russia investigation that led to his conviction as “completely bogus.”

The press secretary complained that there are “really two standards of justice” in the country, arguing former officials like former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe should have faced similar charges.