News Desk :
Death toll from Covid-19 soared to 2,19,258 while total cases reached 31,60,779 in 210 countries and territories and recovered 9,74,672, according to worldometer.
Three months in-after 59,266 US deaths with 10,35,765 infections and a potential economic depression-it’s still unclear whether President Donald Trump grasps the gravity of the coronavirus crisis.
The man who said he knew more about ISIS than the generals and claimed to have stunned dumfounded aides with his scientific acuity prides himself on a mystical instinct to make right calls.
Yet Trump’s leadership in the worst domestic crisis since World War II has consistently featured wrong, ill-informed and dangerous decisions, omissions and politically fueled pivots.
“Many very good experts, very good people too, said this would never affect the United States,” Trump told CNN’s Jim Acosta on Tuesday. “The experts got it wrong. A lot of people got it wrong and a lot of people didn’t know it would be this serious.”
The US economy contracted in the first quarter at its sharpest pace since the Great Recession in 2008 as stringent measures to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus almost shut down the country, ending the longest expansion in the nation’s history.
The Commerce Department said gross domestic product fell at a 4.8% annualised rate in the January-to-March period after expanding at a 2.1% rate in the final three months of 2019.
The decline reflected a plunge in economic activity in the last two weeks of March, which saw millions of Americans seeking unemployment benefits.
The President’s deflections on Tuesday are typical of his wider political method of evading responsibility by bending the truth and of creating distractions. They play into what is apparently his most pressing concern-massaging his own reputation. Such tactics helped him ride out the Russia scandal and impeachment.
But in the depths of the current disorientating times, the deeper liabilities of the President’s political approach are being exposed. A hostility to details, a resistance to accepting the advice of experts and for learning the messy intricacies of a crisis that interrupted his own narrative in election year. Bolstering such an impression, the Washington Post reported for instance that multiple references to the threat from the novel coronavirus were embedded into Trump’s classified briefings. Either he didn’t read them or he chose to ignore them.
Trump’s initial failure was to downplay the seriousness of the crisis. But his management of the situation ever since then has raised questions about the extent to which the President has appreciated the multi-front challenge facing the United States and the world.
Humanity is facing three crises at the very least-medical, economic and social-that will cause financial and geopolitical reverberations for years. Yet Trump says he sees “light at the end of the tunnel” and acts as if America is nearly home free.
Doubts about the seriousness of the administration’s response were also revealed in a more trivial, yet still telling, episode on Tuesday when Vice President Mike Pence flouted CDC guidance and chose not to wear a facemask during a visit to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Pence explained that he is frequently tested for Covid-19 so was unlikely to be an asymptomatic carrier of the disease.
But he missed a chance to set an example to the rest of the country.
Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy climbed by 382 on Tuesday, against 333 the day before, the Civil Protection Agency said, while the total of people infected since the start of the outbreak topped 200,000.
The daily tally of new infections stood at 2,091, higher than the 1,739 recorded on Monday.
The daily death toll of 382 was the highest since Saturday, and Italy’s total number of fatalities since its epidemic came to light on Feb. 21 now stands at 27,359, the agency said – the second highest in the world after that of the United States.
The total of officially confirmed cases, which includes those who have died and recovered, amounts to 201,505, the third highest global tally behind those of the United States and Spain.
People registered as currently carrying the illness fell to 105,205 from 105,813 on Monday.
There were 1,863 people in intensive care on Tuesday against a previous 1,956, maintaining a long-running decline. Of those originally infected, 68,941 were declared recovered against 66,624 a day earlier.
The agency said 1.275 million people had been tested for the virus against 1.237 million the day before, out of a population of around 60 million.
Spain recorded 325 deaths from the novel coronavirus overnight, up from 301 reported the previous day, but health officials said the epidemic was evolving favourably as the country prepares for a gradual easing of its lockdown from next week.
The overall death toll from the virus rose by 453 to 24,275, the health ministry said, adding that the additional cases were from the previous days in the region of Galicia.
The number of diagnosed cases rose by 2,144 from Tuesday to 212,917, the world’s second-highest tally after the United States, the ministry said.
“The evolution we are seeing is still very favourable and is in line with what we expected,” health emergency coordinator Fernando Simon told a news briefing on Wednesday.
The daily number of deaths has come down sharply from the record 950 seen in early April.
He said the so-called ‘R’ rate – the average number of infections that one person with the virus causes – stood at below 1 in almost all areas of the country.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced late on Tuesday a four-phase plan to lift one of the toughest coronavirus lockdowns in Europe that would culminate in a return to normality by the end of June.
The implementation will vary from province to province depending on factors such as how the rate of infection evolves, the number of intensive care beds available locally and compliance with distancing rules. These targets are yet to be announced.
The lockdown restrictions have halted public life since March 14 and nearly paralysed the economy.
Data released on Wednesday showed Spanish retail sales fell 14.1% in March from a year earlier on a calendar-adjusted basis, after rising 1.8% in February.
Most stores closed during the second half of last month as part of the lockdown and have remained shut in April.
