Trump says the coronavirus is ‘going away.’ CDC says cases in U.S. may be 10 times higher than reported
President Donald Trump keeps spinning a tale about COVID-19 that is at odds with his own administration’s disease experts and data compiled by his own coronavirus task force, which was obtained exclusively by NBC News.
In Trump’s telling, the deadly pandemic isn’t really a serious threat to the public and rising infection rates are simply due to increased testing. “It’s going away,” he said Tuesday at an event in Phoenix.
But on the same day, the coronavirus task force produced an internal document showing that Phoenix had the highest number of new cases among the 10 metropolitan regions where the week-over-week change in infection rates spiked the most. Arizona’s biggest city had recorded 13,169 new cases over the previous seven days, accounting for a jump of 149.2 percent over the previous week’s infection rate. [Continue reading…]
The true number of Americans who’ve been infected with COVID-19 may top 20 million, according to new estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Our best estimate right now is that for every case that’s reported, there actually are 10 other infections,” CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said on a call with reporters Thursday.
The assessment comes from looking at blood samples across the country for the presence of antibodies to the virus. For every confirmed case of COVID-19, 10 more people had antibodies, Redfield said, referring to proteins in the blood that indicate whether a person’s immune system has previously fought off the coronavirus. [Continue reading…]