The daily death total in the United States exceeded 1,000 for the first time in weeks yesteray, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there were far more infections than have been reported.
The news came as President Trump abandoned his consistently rosy forecasts and told reporters during his first coronavirus briefing since April that the outbreak would probably “get worse before it gets better.”
Having previously described recent outbreaks around the country as just “embers” of the virus, Trump conceded that there were now “big fires,” particularly in Florida and elsewhere across the South and West.
He also reversed his resistance to masks, for the first time imploring Americans to wear them and acknowledging that “they have an impact.”
Trump was asked about the whereabouts of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had said on CNN earlier Tuesday that he hadn’t gotten an invite.
‘I was not invited up to this point,’ Fauci said, just an hour before Trump was set to take the podium and speak about the coronavirus.
The seven-day average of deaths in the United States reached 810 on Tuesday, up from an average of about 475 in early July.
Public health experts have warned for weeks that deaths would trail new cases by about a month and case counts have risen substantially since mid-June, when states began lifting stay-at-home orders and reopening businesses.
There were 65,449 new cases yesterday.
But the number of people infected with the coronavirus in different parts of the United States has been anywhere from two to 13 times higher than the reported rates for those regions, according to data released Tuesday by the C.D.C.
“These data continue to show that the number of people who have been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 far exceeds the number of reported cases,” Dr. Fiona Havers, the C.D.C. researcher who led the study, said in an email. “Many of these people likely had no symptoms or mild illness and may have had no idea that they were infected.”
Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has called the coronavirus the ‘Trump virus’, criticizing Trump for failures in his response to the pandemic.
Appearing on CNN last night, Pelosi told Wolf Blitzer that the president had made a bad situation worse.
She said the pandemic was still raging ‘because of his inaction’.
She added: ‘Clearly it is the Trump virus.’
Republican leaders labored yesterday to avert a party revolt over the next round of coronavirus aid, announcing that they planned to provide $105 billion for schools, direct payments to American families and more aid for struggling small businesses.
Even as Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, divulged details of his emerging plan, which is expected to be worth roughly $1 trillion, Trump had yet to sign on and Republicans remained deeply divided over several key elements.
Ahead of what are expected to be difficult negotiations with Democrats, Senate Republicans and White House officials were fighting over how much money to devote to testing and to the federal health agencies on the front lines of the virus response; whether to include a payroll tax cut that Trump has demanded; and how to address the expiration of the enhanced unemployment benefits at the end of the month.
Trump yesterday offered a positive assessment of the economy: “We are in a pandemic, and yet we are producing tremendous numbers of jobs,” he said during his virus-focused news conference.
While it is true that nearly five million positions were brought back in June, over all the United States is still down about 14.7 million jobs since February.