Coronavirus Live Updates: Trump’s Mt. Rushmore Crowd ‘Won’t Be Social Distancing,’ S.D. Governor Says
Infections within the Secret Service forced Pence to change a visit to Arizona. Britain will drop quarantine restrictions for more than 50 countries, but not for the U.S.
Credit...Tannen Maury/EPA, via Shutterstock
3 July 2020
With U.S. infections surging, Trump heads to Mount Rushmore for fireworks, with a crowd expected to number in the thousands.
Health officials are urging Americans to scale back their Fourth of July plans as the coronavirus pandemic makes a frightening resurgence.
New cases reported have increased 90 percent in the United States in the last two weeks. At least five states set single-day case records on Friday: Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, North Carolina and South Carolina, according to data compiled by The New York Times. In South Carolina, where more than 1,800 new cases were announced Friday, the positivity rate has hovered around 20 percent this week, up from about 10 percent in early June. In Kansas, where at least 770 new cases were announced, daily reporting totals vary widely because the state government only releases new data three times a week.
On Thursday, the United States set a single-day case record for the sixth time in nine days, with more than 55,000 new cases announced, and single-day highs in eight states. Domestic travel restrictions have re-emerged, and many locales have slowed or reversed reopenings.
The vast majority of July 4 fireworks displays in big cities and small rural towns have been canceled. Most politicians, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, are foregoing the traditional parades and flag-waving appearances.
President Trump, however, has a different, discordant message: the sparkly, booming show must go on at all costs. Mr. Trump is set to travel to South Dakota on Friday evening for a massive fireworks display at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial, a made-for-TV patriotic display that he has spent years lobbying to revive. (There have been no fireworks at Mount Rushmore since 2009 because of fears that they would set off forest fires and contaminate groundwater.)
He plans to follow up his trip with a “Salute to America” celebration the following day on the South Lawn at the White House, including a military flyover and a massive fireworks display on the National Mall that Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, has warned violates local health guidelines.
Mr. Trump has consistently downplayed concerns over new cases, claiming that young people “get better much easier and faster” and that the virus will “just disappear.”
In many places across the country, face coverings have gone from suggestions to mandates, but Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a Republican, said there were no plans to enforce social distancing during Mr. Trump’s open-air address before a live audience expected to number about 7,500 people, framed by some of the nation’s most revered presidents.
“We’re asking them to come, be ready to celebrate, to enjoy the freedoms and the liberties that we have in this country,” Ms. Noem said in an interview earlier this week with Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “We won’t be social distancing.”
Early in the pandemic, more than 1,000 cases were linked to the Smithfield pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, which remains one of the country’s largest known clusters. But in recent weeks, South Dakota has had one of the country’s most encouraging trend lines. The state has averaged a few-dozen new cases each day, including 85 announced Friday. There has not been a day with more than 100 new cases in South Dakota since late May.
Coronavirus cases are rising sharply, but deaths are still down.
Image Credit...Go Nakamura/Getty Images
In April and May, Covid-19 led to as many as 3,000 deaths per day, and claimed the lives of roughly 7 to 8 percent of infected Americans. Now, even though cases are rising in the majority of states, some of which are hitting single-day records, the number of daily deaths is now closer to 600, and the death rate is less than 5 percent.
Because death reports can lag diagnoses by weeks, the current rise in coronavirus cases could still portend increases in mortality in the days to come. However, there are also a few factors that help explain the apparent drop.
One is increased diagnostic testing, which has identified many more infected individuals with mild or no symptoms. That means those who die with Covid-19 form a smaller overall proportion of cases, said Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
And with more tests available, infections are often identified earlier, “which allows us to intervene earlier,” said Saskia Popescu, a hospital epidemiologist and infectious disease expert in Arizona.
Health experts also noted that treatments have improved, and that the virus is now infecting more young people, who are less likely to die of an infection.
For the U.S. capital, July 4 will mean protests as well as fireworks (with masks).
Image Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times
A number of protests are planned for Independence Day in the nation’s capital, ahead of the annual fireworks display and a military flyover hosted by Mr. Trump.
Since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the end of May, Washington has become a center of protests. Its mayor, Muriel Bowser, publicly challenged Mr. Trump’s decision to order National Guard troops into the city, and presided over the painting of the words “Black Lives Matter” in giant yellow letters on a street near the White House.
Black Lives Matter DC together with two other groups, Sunrise and the Black Youth Project 100, announced several events over the weekend focused on defunding the police. The Instagram account #dcteensaction lists at least nine protests for Saturday, including a march near the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, in which participants will form a human flag, and an evening protest beginning in Malcolm X Park on 16th Street. The poster advertising that last one features a line by the African-American poet Langston Hughes: “America was never America to me.”
For the official celebration, the federal government said it would provide around 300,000 face coverings, and a news release from the Department of the Interior warned visitors to observe social distancing — while noting that viewing areas on the Mall would be accessible by four security entry points. Ms. Bowser told reporters that she did not think the event was in keeping with federal health officials’ guidelines for gatherings during the pandemic.
The holiday comes amid a national reckoning over racism, and the founding story of the United States is part of what is being questioned right now.
William H. Lamar IV, the pastor of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church, a few blocks from the White House, said he did not normally celebrate the Fourth but that this year the country might be observing the holiday with more honesty than usual.
“The tremors that we feel right now, that is the old, mendacious mythology cracking,” Reverend Lamar said. “The symbols coming down, that’s only the beginning. That’s people saying, we need a new story. This story excludes me. It is inherently violent and evil. It murdered me. It erased me as a human being. I deserve a story that includes me and wants me to flourish.”
He added: “Is there a kind of national story that can hold us together in this multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious reality? The survival of this experiment called America depends upon it.”
Illicit pyrotechnics are proliferating, to the dismay of neighbors and firefighters.
Image Credit...Kathy Willens/Associated Press
With few Fourth of July fireworks displays planned, Americans who have been in lockdown for months and are slowly remerging have taken matters into their own hands, purchasing professional-grade fireworks and setting them off in their own neighborhoods.
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