Addressing the nation from the Bioprocess Innovation Center in North Carolina, President Trump on Monday painted an optimistic picture of the United States’ recovery from the coronavirus pandemic—while dismissing one of the only proven ways to mitigate the spread of the virus in the first place.

“I really do believe a lot of the governors should be opening up states that they’re not opening,” he said in response to a question about whether the US economy would see a V-shaped recovery. Despite a recent surge in cases in Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, whom Trump praised on Monday, has refused to shut down the state’s economy.

Trump also announced that the biotechnology company Moderna had entered phase 3 of vaccine development, meaning that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine is now being used in clinical trials. “We will achieve a victory over the virus by unleashing America’s scientific genius,” he said, flanked by screens bearing the words “Operation Warp Speed.”

If only there were another way.

Update, July 25, 4pm ET: Sinclair says it will “delay” the broadcast of America This Week featuring Judy Mikovits.

The discredited researcher behind “Plandemic”—a viral video that falsely suggests the coronavirus is “activated” by face masks, amid other bizarre claims—is set for a major revival this weekend. And you have the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has drawn criticism for its ultra-conservative, pro-Trump programming, to thank.

On the show America This Week, which is distributed to hundreds of local news stations operated by Sinclair, host Eric Bolling interviewed Judy Mikovits, the virologist whose wild assertions about the coronavirus and infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci are at the center of “Plandemic.” The interview, which was first reported on by liberal watchdog group Media Matters, included chyrons asking, “Was COVID-19 Created in a Lab?” and “Did Dr. Fauci Create Coronavirus?” 

Sinclair is now airing straight-up coronavirus conspiracy theorists (of "Plandemic" notoriety) across the country. A point of discussion was whether Fauci created covid himself. Unspeakably irresponsible. More via @mmfa @zpleat here: https://t.co/eNUC2AyWMu pic.twitter.com/cZSrkkQQ52

— Pam Vogel (@pamela_vogel) July 23, 2020

Mikovits gained notoriety in May for her starring role in “Plandemic,” a 26-minute video asserting several misleading or false theories about Fauci and the origin of the coronavirus. The video, which was viewed more than eight million times in one week despite being removed from most social media platforms, is supposedly excerpted from a forthcoming movie, which aims to “expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system.” 

Originally a chronic fatigue syndrome researcher, Mikovits has become an icon of the coronavirus-skeptic community for her outlandish allegations, including that a possible virus vaccine will “kill millions.” She also has carried a long personal grudge against Fauci, who she holds responsible for her personal downfall. In November 2011, Mikovits was arrested and charged with stealing property from her previous employer, a nonprofit medical research center in Nevada. The charges were ultimately dropped, but in “Plandemic,” Mikovits described the case against her as a vast government conspiracy spearheaded by Fauci. “He directed the cover-up,” Mikovits says. “And, in fact, everybody else was paid off, and paid off big time.” But, as the University of Pennsylvania’s FactCheck.org reported, “at no point in the video does anyone explain what Fauci supposedly covered up.” 

In the interview with Bolling, Mikovits said Fauci “manufactured” the coronavirus at a military base in Maryland and “shipped” it to Wuhan, China. She cited no evidence. Bolling did not push back, only acknowledging it was a “hefty” claim—though Bolling insisted to CNN, that was him challenging her. He also told the network he was completely unaware of her role in “Plandemic.” 

Sinclair, originally founded in Baltimore, has become one of the largest local television providers in the country and well known for its pro-Trump programming. Before he was dropped last year, former Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn sparked controversy for saying during a political commentary segment for Sinclair that migrants were mounting an “attempted invasion” of the United States; Sinclair apologized for the remark and eventually moved Epshteyn into a different role within the company. All this is particularly problematic since, as CNN notes, public opinion research shows more Americans trust their local news than media more broadly.

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a Nevada church’s attempt to circumvent state limits on attendees at religious services during the coronavirus pandemic. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberal members in ruling against the church, which had said it was unfair for houses of worship to be limited to 50 attendees, while casinos in the state could still operate at 50 percent occupancy. 

Roberts’ deciding vote sent right-wing Twitter, and at least two US senators, into a frenzy.

“John Roberts has abandoned his oath,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted early Saturday morning. “But, on the upside, maybe Nevada churches should set up craps tables? Then they could open?” Cruz’s post included a screenshot of Justice Neil Gorsuch’s one-paragraph dissenting opinion, which said, “In Nevada, it seems, it is better to be in entertainment than religion.” 

Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, is no one’s idea of a #Resistance hero, but he has repeatedly angered conservatives by siding with the court’s liberal minority in certain high-profile cases. In 2012, he famously saved the Affordable Care Act by declaring it a tax. Last month, he joined a 5-4 vote to protect abortion rights (at least for now). And he recently wrote the court’s opinion blocking President Donald Trump from immediately ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. 

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who said after the abortion case that Roberts was “apparently more concerned with liberal opinion than with doing the right thing,” had more sharp words for the conservative jurist following the Nevada church decision:

John Roberts at his hearing: “If the Constitution says that the little guy should win, the little guy’s going to win in court before me.”

What happened to that judge?

He didn't mention his belief that casinos have more rights than churches. https://t.co/KjpyLbkIMo

— Tom Cotton (@TomCottonAR) July 25, 2020

On a more conservative court, Roberts has increasingly become the swing justice, making him an easy target for right-wing purists. Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), who is in the midst of a tight Senate race in Georgia with Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, called the Nevada ruling “another horribly disappointing” Supreme Court decision. Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and prime candidate for weirdest tweeter of the decade, had perhaps the strongest condemnation of Roberts on Saturday:

Thanks @realDonaldTrump for appointing Gorsuch. Too bad Chief In-Justice John Roberts is so swamp-infected that he protects casinos & punishes places of worship. He needs to retire, but first he just needs to repent! https://t.co/ZFjyvxTRn6

— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) July 25, 2020

Trump himself was relatively muted about the decision on Saturday morning, and didn’t call out Roberts by name—even though he has not been reluctant to criticize the justice directly in the past. In 2012, he sent off a flurry of not-so-nice tweets in the aftermath of the Obamacare ruling:

John Roberts arrived in Malta yesterday. Maybe we will get lucky and he will stay there.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 5, 2012

Congratulations to John Roberts for making Americans hate the Supreme Court because of his BS http://t.co/Vlyj8nKx

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2012

Since taking office, Trump has railed against the “Obama judges” who declare his policies unconstitutional, sparking a rare rebuke from Roberts and—inevitably—more tough talk from Trump. The president has kept the court high in Republican voters’ minds as a key issue for 2020, tweeting after the recent DACA decision about these “horrible & politically charged decisions coming out of the Supreme Court,” adding that conservatives “need more Justices or we will lose our 2nd. Amendment & everything else.” 

On Saturday, in response to the Nevada ruling, he had a much more succinct message: “Win in 2020!!!”

In a reversal of his previous plans, President Trump announced Thursday that the portions of the 2020 Republican National Convention scheduled to take place in Jacksonville, Florida will be cancelled.

The official business of the RNC—delegates’ nomination of a Republican presidential candidate—will still take place in person in Charlotte, North Carolina, the original convention site. When North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared the three subsequent days of speeches and celebrations unsafe amid the coronavirus pandemic, ceremonies were relocated to Jacksonville. Now, they’re cancelled too.

I love the Great State of North Carolina, so much so that I insisted on having the Republican National Convention in Charlotte at the end of August. Unfortunately, Democrat Governor, @RoyCooperNC is still in Shutdown mood & unable to guarantee that by August we will be allowed…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 25, 2020

Despite Trump’s previous insistence on holding a full in-person rally to celebrate his nomination, he painted the decision to cancel the event, which he announced at his third coronavirus briefing of the week, as his idea.

“I looked at my team and I said, ‘The timing for this event is not right, just not right, with what’s happened recently, the flare-up in Florida, to have a big convention,” he said. “It’s not the right time.'”

“They said, ‘Sir, we can make this work very easily,'” he continued, before launching into a tangent about the “senseless violence” he claims is plaguing American cities. “I said, ‘There’s nothing more important in our country than keeping our people safe, whether that’s from the China virus or the radical left mob that you see in Portland.'”

As the world grapples with the devastation of the coronavirus, one thing is clear: The United States simply wasn’t prepared. Despite repeated warnings from infectious disease experts, we lacked essential beds, equipment, and medication; public health advice was confusing, and our leadership offered no clear direction while sidelining credible health professionals and institutions. Infectious disease experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before the next pandemic, and that could be even more deadly. So how do we fix what COVID has shown was broken? In this Mother Jones series, we’re asking experts from a wide range of disciplines one question: What are the most important steps we can take to make sure we’re better prepared next time?

Andy Slavitt knows the ins and outs of public health in America. After decades of leadership in health care companies, he served under President Obama as the acting administrator for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, where he was instrumental in implementing the Affordable Care Act. United States of Care, the nonprofit he helped build in the years since, aims to improve access to health care for all Americans. 

Slavitt grasped the seriousness of the coronavirus back in February, when he urged the White House to ramp up preparations—and he wasn’t shy about criticizing what he saw as a woefully inadequate response. In March, he predicted the shortage of hospital beds and ventilators. Since then, he’s emerged as an authority on both the medical and political dimensions of COVID-19. His podcast, “In the Bubble,” tackles vaccine science, offers advice on confronting mask deniers, and offers solutions to the emerging hunger crisis as the economy falters. His prolific Twitter feed is required coronavirus reading—in voicey threads, he contextualizes the torrent of overwhelming pandemic news. Earlier this week, he summed up what seems like his guiding principle in a single tweet: “Crises are shorter when governments are better.” 

On the three biggest things we can do to prepare for the next pandemic: I gave a speech at School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota in December—little did I know how close we were coming to a pandemic—and I said that the biggest problem in public health is there is no effective public health lobby and no one had put together a case for $100 billion of investment in the country’s public health infrastructure. Here we are, $4 or $5 trillion later, and $100 billion seems like a dream.

We need to be able to do very quick tracing and testing and have that infrastructure up and ready to go. We also need the physical infrastructure, a cache of ready supplies, probably in regional hubs that are continually maintained. For this particular crisis, we know that looks like masks and shields. But depending upon how something spreads, it could be other things. And along with that, we need a domestic drug supply manufacturing capacity so we can control some of the critical medications and not have to rely on overseas trade. I’m quite sure we can get the literal things right. We probably will never run out of ventilators again. But it’s a little bit like responding to 9/11 by saying, “Okay, now we can’t bring water into the airport anymore.” Very literal, right? But that will miss the more substantive lesson.

The second category is health care resilience. We have a health care system where access is tied to employment, and when employment goes down—and it often does in crises like this—people lose access. Another example is the fee-for-service model in hospitals, which stop getting any money when people stopped using elective services. This can also be something we can anticipate in a pandemic. And that money instead is with insurance companies who are supposed to be middlemen. They’re not supposed to be sitting on the money for people. It should be in the community, investing in public health. So you have to change the way care providers are paid. And you have to separate people’s access to health care from whether they’re working.

The third thing is the psychological element to preparedness. We don’t think about public health events. Right now, you can’t go to a major corporation or a school district and say, “Who’s your expert or leader about the health of the population?” And that’s going to need to change at every level. Starting at the federal level, we probably need a cabinet-level position to respond to biological threats, the equivalent of what we did when we created the Department of Homeland Security. It could be done somewhere else. But I think you want somebody who has accountability to the president. We have a president who tore down the infrastructure, and we can’t ever let another president do that again. The safest way for Congress to do that is to create a cabinet responsibility.

But not just at the federal level. I think we need to do that at the state level and at the corporate and company level, at the municipality level. And what that will mean is lots more people having the opportunity within public health as a career. People could work for Google and be in their public health department. Or you could work in a municipality and think about the health issues there. That’s what it’s going to take to have more public health consciousness, rather than having to go back to where it was before the pandemic, which is something that can’t get funded, or continually gets its funding cut.

On Trump-proofing the public health system: You can’t Trump-proof anything. People who want to destroy things and act like little children and have temper tantrums—you shouldn’t elect people like that. Take the CDC: Basically, over time, Trump wanted to neutralize and antagonize the scientific community. He did the same thing at EPA. The lesson for the American public is that in electing a president, you’re electing the entire government.

But I think if you bake in a cabinet-level position with congressional oversight, you have better checks and balances at least. And then, of course, you have to have sufficient funding that goes to the states so you don’t have to have states that are begging and pleading for every dollar.

On the culpability of White House coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx in reopening too early: We can debate whether it was because she was politically trying to please Trump, or because she didn’t see and understand the data correctly. But ultimately she made the wrong call. And it’s not like, “Oh, well this is 20/20 hindsight, she made a mistake, which happens.” Everybody saw what she didn’t see. The lesson is not: it’s not about Birx, it’s about Trump. Because if you cherry-pick the advice you take and make it clear that you only want answers that suit you, then you will pigeonhole yourself. A good president—and I only have experience with one, President Obama—knows how to seek advice and counsel from all quarters to make sure every option is on the table. I’m pretty certain that if Trump had said, “I am open to whatever option you want to put on the table, including things that keep the government shut down,” she would have put different options on the table. I think he hedged her into, “I’m opening May 1, you need to show me how.” That’s not the right way to seek advice from your senior advisors. I don’t let her off the hook. She made a mistake. She should have done better. But it starts with the way Trump manages.

On schools: Next time, it will be great to have red-teamed all of these situations. Who can go to school safely if they don’t live with anyone immunocompromised? Do you have the kind of space you need? Can we get better at distance learning? And if so, what’s the age group where it’s effective and ineffective? If we’re able to know these things going in, then we can have a contingency plan, and it doesn’t have to be this kind of crisis. Right now, we don’t have backup plans, because in this country, we run real-time and efficient. There’s a broad lesson that applies to different elements in society around contingency planning. One of the fallacies of the idea that you starve the government until you need the government is that you end up spending ten times as much money and you spend it less efficiently than if you spent a little bit preparing. I was talking to a former Republican congressman, and I said, “Would you have said yes to increasing people’s taxes or increasing the deficit to fund the preparation for a low-probability event that may not occur?” And the truth is, in Republican leadership, that wouldn’t have stood a chance.

On what we can learn from New York: We learned that a hard lockdown is a critical option that has to be on the table. They did it all over Europe. They did it all over Asia. That is a much better way to get rid of the virus much more quickly. Cuomo did that. The second lesson is that when you’re the governor, you’re going to take criticism, no matter what. And there’s no way to avoid managing in a difficult situation without having people upset with you. If you communicate with people consistently and openly and honestly, then you have more permission to make tough decisions.

Tough political decisions pay off. The hard part is they don’t pay off immediately. But you put yourself in an even stronger position politically by being able to make tough decisions when there is evidence that they’re going to work. And he shows that can be done. I give Governor Abbott credit in Texas for putting in place the mask mandate. He didn’t do it as quickly as people would have liked him to—yesterday is always better than today, but today is better than tomorrow. We have governors who are learning from new information and adapting and making better decisions. I think that ought to be appreciated.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

President Trump pushed his desire to see schools reopen in his Wednesday evening coronavirus briefing, claiming that “a lot of people are saying” kids are unlikely to transmit the coronavirus to adults. Sorry, but the science—at least for now—isn’t saying that.

“They don’t transmit very easily,” Trump said when asked whether he was concerned that opening up schools would lead children to spread the virus to older family members. “They don’t catch it easily, they don’t bring it home easily, and if they do catch it, they get better fast.”

It’s certainly a consoling thought. But, as my colleague Jackie Mogensen recently reported, the science is still unclear. We do know, she wrote, that “children can become infected,” and it seems they tend to have milder symptoms than adults. But, she adds:

All this begs the question that’s crucial for schools in particular: If children show milder symptoms, does that mean they aren’t spreading the virus as much? That’s not totally understood, Zeichner says. “The likelihood of transmission depends on the amount of virus that somebody is producing, and the interaction of the person with the virus with the person who isn’t infected,” he says. “It is likely that children and adults with fewer symptoms may be producing less virus, which probably makes them less likely to transmit the infection.” But researchers are still investigating whether that’s the case.

And even those investigations are thorny. As our other colleague Kiera Butler wrote earlier this week, we can’t even be sure that the incubation period—the time between exposure to the virus and onset of symptoms—for kids is the same as that of adults.

Since there’s no consensus about whether children are less likely to transmit the virus to adults, there’s no consensus among public health experts about whether schools should reopen their doors to students. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from handing off the responsibility for reopening schools to local leaders while blindly hoping that the science works out. That always goes so well.

As a bonus, Trump proclaimed at the end of the briefing that he has “done more for Black Americans than anybody, with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.” There does seem to be a clear consensus on that one.

There has been a mountain of stories written about kids, the coronavirus, and schools (including this definitively excellent piece by my colleague Jackie Flynn Mogensen). But last week, a small detail in a widely shared commentary from the medical journal Pediatrics caught my eye. “COVID-19 and Children: The Child is Not to Blame” examines studies of household transmission of the coronavirus in other countries and concludes that children rarely spread the virus to the other members of their household—usually it’s the adults who spread it to the children. It’s gotten a lot of attention. One of the authors, William Raszka, a pediatrician affiliated with the University of Vermont, appeared on a July 16 Fox News segment and advocated for the reopening of schools. 

As others have pointed out, it’s tricky to compare studies of households in other countries to those in the United States because of a host of confounding variables. (Different lockdown policies! Different kinds of classrooms! Fewer mask refusers!). But let’s leave all that aside for a moment and just look at the studies themselves. This line about a study in Switzerland jumped out at me: 

Of 39 evaluable households, in only 3 (8%) was a child the suspected index case, with symptom onset preceding illness in adult HHCs [household contacts]. In all other households, the child developed symptoms after or concurrent with adult HHCs, suggesting that the child was not the source of infection and that children most frequently acquire COVID-19 from adults, rather than transmitting it to them.

In other words, either a scientist or contact tracers interviewed families that got COVID-19 and asked when each household member’s symptoms began. If the kids’ symptoms began at the same time, or after the adults, the investigators assumed that the adults caught the virus and brought it home to the kids, rather than vice versa. Chinese studies that the authors looked at relied on this same method of “symptom chronology.”

Here’s the problem: The authors’ conclusion—that children rarely bring the coronavirus home and spread it to their households—assumes that the time between exposure and when symptoms appear in children is the same as that for adults. Given that we already know that children’s immune systems seem to behave differently with the coronavirus from adults, should we accept as a given that their incubation periods are the same? I put the question to Raszka, and he reassured me via email: “To the best of our knowledge, the incubation period of the virus is the same in children as it is in adults: 2-14 days.” 

But Linda Saif, an immunologist with Ohio State University and the American Association of Immunologists, had a different take. “There are just too few studies, in asymptomatic children especially, to really understand the transmission dynamics,” she wrote to me in an email.” She pointed out a Chinese paper from April that reviewed the data on children and the coronavirus. It found that children’s average incubation period was 6.5 days, slightly longer than the 5.4 day average in adults. If that’s true, Saif wrote, the findings in the Pediatrics paper “may not reflect the true transmission picture.” 

I want to be careful here: It would be hasty to assume the Chinese paper is the authority on the incubation period in children. As Saif noted, there’s probably not enough research for anyone to know for sure whether symptoms appear within the same amount of time for kids and adults. Here’s what would help: Studies that rely on frequent testing of everyone in households, rather than self-reporting of when symptoms started.

Also, considering the fact that some people with COVID-19 never show symptoms at all, an epidemiologist friend pointed out that we should be doing more “seroprevalence” studies—testing people in households for antibodies to determine who actually had the virus. One such study from Spain, published earlier this month in the medical journal The Lancet, found that children under age 10 were somewhat less likely than adults to have antibodies. That suggests that children may be less likely to acquire COVID-19 (though some people have theorized that people who don’t experience symptoms don’t make very many antibodies—and of course, antibody tests are notoriously unreliable). 

Anyway, I bring all this up not to annoyingly punch holes in what seems like an otherwise reasonable commentary in Pediatrics—rather, to just point out that it is yet one more example of the crushing number of tiny details that could make a big difference in the impossible decisions facing parents, teachers, and leaders as the school year fast approaches. 

As the world grapples with the devastation of the coronavirus, one thing is clear: The United States simply wasn’t prepared. Despite repeated warnings from infectious disease experts over the years, we lacked essential beds, equipment, and medication; public health advice was confusing, and our leadership offered no clear direction while sidelining credible health professionals and institutions. Infectious disease experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before the next pandemic hits, and that could be even more deadly. So how do we fix what COVID has shown was broken? In this Mother Jones series, we’re asking experts from a wide range of disciplines one question: What are the most important steps we can take to make sure we’re better prepared next time around?

Before the pandemic, Laurel Bristow was an infectious disease researcher studying respiratory pathogens at Emory University’s Vaccine Center. In March, her lab paused its work because of the pandemic. Within days, Bristow began posting Instagram videos from her cheerful kitchen explaining the science behind the coronavirus headlines. She struck a nerve: Her account quickly grew from a few hundred to 99,000 followers. It’s not hard to see why she’s popular—Bristow deftly unpacks complex scientific concepts. She explains why critics of masks are wrong. She handily dispatches with conspiracy theories. She sheds light on the mysterious vaccine development process. She emphasizes the connection between science and the struggle for racial justice. And she does it all with millennial sass, the occasional silly filter, and cameos from her cat. Through her posts, she’s won her followers’ trust. “We’ve built social media platforms in a way that people trust individuals accounts and are more inclined to listen to what they’re saying—whether it’s right or wrong—than they are to a government agency that feels outdated and inaccessible,” she says. Bristow posts on Instagram at @kinggutterbaby.

On how her account grew: In mid-March, I had a private Instagram account with under 700 followers. It was all just people that I personally knew. My studies at work had gotten halted because of coronavirus, so I just made a post one day and said, “Would anybody be interested in knowing and understanding what’s going on with Coronavirus?” I think like 10 people said, “Yeah, I would love to hear it.” So I made my first ever front-facing video to just explain, what coronavirus is, and why we’re concerned, and why we need to flatten the curve, and what that means. People asked if I could make my profile public so that they could share it. I’m pretty sure my post said something like, Alright, I’m gonna make my profile public for 24 hours. Please don’t be horny about it and don’t send me weird DMs, strangers! I got 500 followers overnight and 2000 followers by the weekend. People just kept sending me stuff asking Can you explain this? Or what does this mean? So I just started making little videos and little stories, explaining the research that was coming out. I’ve never hash-tagged anything. I’ve never asked anyone to share my account. It has just grown from people really wanting information from someone that they feel that they can trust. Now, when I look at the stories that I’ve posted, after they’ve been out for almost a day, 20 or 30,000 people are watching them.

On the disconnect between scientists and the public: It’s been interesting to see how much my Instagram has grown. I think it highlights that there is such a big gap between the content of scientific papers and how they get translated to the public. I suspect a lot of media outlets don’t necessarily have a science writer on staff. So it causes a lot of confusion about what is fact and what is still theoretical. I think people are really desperate to have someone lay things out for them in a way that they can understand, that doesn’t feel condescending, that feels like it’s a factual summary of really complex ideas. They want to know who to trust and how to understand what makes a good research paper, as well as the limitations of specific papers, or even just of what science can accomplish right now.

It’s hard because in the age of the internet, people are so used to getting answers quickly. It’s been a big adjustment  to try to understand that things are going to change as we have more information. In the beginning, the CDC told people not to wear masks, because the only thing people were thinking of were hospital grade masks, and we didn’t want to take that away from frontline workers who needed them. No one really considered the benefit of wearing cloth masks. So the recommendations changed. The difference between asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic has also caused a lot of issues with communication. People in the industry sometimes say something that is very clear to other people who are in the industry, but it’s not very clear to the public. At the same time, the public doesn’t understand that because we’re in a pandemic, some things will be reported as preliminary and then updated later. And when it gets updated, people get confused and think that they were lied to at the beginning, when the reality is, everything’s getting updated all the time.

On how she explains the pandemic to the public: I write outlines as if I’m having a conversation with someone. I was always taught that the best way to learn a subject is to see if you can teach it to somebody else. So I imagine I’m teaching a lesson, and I want to make sure that everyone can understand the concepts. I use a lot of analogies to try to convey complex scientific ideas, and people respond to that pretty well because they want it in a context that they are familiar with.

Humility and understanding go a long way. Sometimes I get DMs where people say, “Okay, you said this, I have absolutely no idea what that means.” And I have to go back and explain it. I always remind myself that when people understand science, and they understand the methods, and they understand what research is saying, they feel empowered, not scared. A lot of people right now don’t understand what’s happening, it causes them to have a lot of anxiety and feel a lot of fear about it. And that’s not how we should feel about science. Information should be empowering so that people feel like they can make smart and informed decisions for themselves and their families.

On why her approach works: People like the format that I use. They like to be able to go on social media and see a story—have someone explain something to them and spell it out. I’m not really familiar with the social media accounts of the CDC all the local departments of public health. But judging from what I saw when I worked in San Francisco on tuberculosis control for the Department of Public Health—all of these places could use a little bit of an upgrade on their social media management, because that is where so many people get their news from. If you aren’t reaching people on their level on these social media accounts, other accounts with large followings are going to fill that void. And that’s how a lot of misinformation gets spread. The organizations tasked with understanding and controlling this pandemic are putting out information, but they’re not putting it out in a way that’s accessible to people. So people are going to turn to the Instagram accounts of someone else who’s telling them in the simplest terms, often what they want to hear, which is not always the truth.

On how to make journalists better at reporting on pandemics: In the time of the pandemic, it would be beneficial for large media organizations to have a literature review class, or some kind of workshop for people who are going to cover it. They could learn, for example, what to look for when they’re reading and critiquing research papers. That goes for people who write headlines, too. Those can be a huge source of miscommunication: The article itself will say one thing, and the headline will say something that’s not entirely true, and that causes a lot of anxiety. 

On battling misinformation on social media: People will say, “Oh, this person is saying this, can you address this?” And it’s hard for me—I have to resist the temptation to address those specific accounts outright, because it gives the false idea that we are equivalent. I have the vast, vast majority in the scientific community backing up what I’m saying with mountains of research, and these people have cherry-picked a few studies that are not even applicable to COVID or to recent research.

On occasion, I’ve directly referenced posts that I know that people will recognize, even if I’m not tagging the person involved. And I’ve said, “Here’s where all of this is wrong.” Because I do think it’s important to pop in sometimes and say, “Look, here’s the thing that you guys need to look for when someone’s posting stuff like this. That looks too good to be true. Here are a few key things to check in and ask yourself, is this real or is this convenient?”

On the need for science literacy education: I spend a lot of time thinking about this. Society’s perception of science for so many years was glasses and a lab coat in a lab taking care of it. The scientists are figuring it out; the scientists will take care of it. It was a very far removed thing that the public didn’t have to think about or interact with. People were okay with that for a long time. Then, as time progressed, science became more elite. It’s used a lot in advertising now, to get people to buy products without questioning. There are a lot of ads that list complex chemical interactions or claim that something boosts your immune system. But they don’t actually explain it. And the underlying feeling behind that is, don’t worry about it. It’s science. It’s too hard to understand. Just trust us.

So I think years of that combination has caused people to finally say, “Wait, I don’t know what’s happening. And I don’t know why I should trust you without understanding what’s happening.” But they don’t have the tools to understand it for themselves. It’s like a lot of other practical things that should be taught as part of the curriculum, things like how to do your taxes. You should also learn how to evaluate a scientific paper. And luckily, there are some books out there that are doing that, and they’re really fun to read. Honestly, debunking bad science is really enjoyable for me because it’s like a little treasure hunt where you figure out where they went wrong or how they’re manipulating things for their own needs, and then you get to say that you cracked the case.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As the COVID-19 crisis escalates across the country, President Donald Trump is continuing to lie about the pandemic, attack his own public health officials, and insist that the virus will eventually disappear on its own. 

His latest remarks—in an interview with Fox’s Chris Wallace that aired Sunday—come at a crucial juncture in the nation’s fight against the coronavirus, with cases rising in most states and death tolls once again climbing. Here are some of Trump’s most alarming, incoherent, and downright absurd lines from the interview:

“I’ll be right eventually.”

When presented with a political cartoon that was posted by a top White House communications official that mocked Dr. Anthony Fauci, Trump claimed that Fauci—one of the administration’s top infectious disease experts—was a “little bit of an alarmist.” Wallace went on to cite multiple examples of the president repeatedly assuring Americans that the virus was “under control,” that infections would soon be “close to zero,” and that at “some point” the diseases would “sort of just disappear, I hope.” Trump responded, “I’ll be right eventually.”

“I’ll say it again: It’s going to disappear—and I’ll be right,” Trump continued, before declaring that he’s “been right probably more than anyone else.”

Chris Wallace: You've been wrong a lot on coronavirus, claiming it will quickly disappear and go down to zero/

Trump: "I will be right eventually…I'll say it again, it's going to disappear." pic.twitter.com/LonHZVO8qB

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) July 19, 2020

“They got that one wrong.”

Despite telling countless lies about the coronavirus, the president falsely blamed public health experts for the very false statements he himself has spread. 

“Everybody thought the summer it would go away and come back in the fall, well in the summer it came,” Trump said. “They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and really knocks it out…They got that one wrong. They got a lot wrong. The World Health [Organization] got a tremendous amount wrong. They basically did whatever China wanted them to.”

The remarks were an extraordinary attempt to distance himself from the numerous falsehoods he promoted about the virus in order to downplay its threat. “The virus that we’re talking about having to do, a lot of people think that goes away in April, with the heat, as the heat comes in, typically that will go away in April,” the president said in February, according to the New York Times. There’s evidence that hot temperatures, sunlight, and humidity kill the virus, but that hasn’t stopped it from spreading in the spring and summer months. In April, however, Trump returned to the idea, suggesting—absurdly—that doctors treat patients with “a very powerful light” or an “injection” of disinfectant.

WATCH: President Trump discusses the U.S. response to the coronavirus. Plus, his relationship with Dr. Fauci and much more. #FoxNewsSunday pic.twitter.com/JUo1c2i96Z

— FoxNewsSunday (@FoxNewsSunday) July 19, 2020

“I heard we have the best mortality rate.”

At one point, Trump and Wallace sparred over the rate at which the virus is killing Americans it infects, with the president repeatedly and incorrectly asserting that the United States has the “number one low mortality rate.” 

Trump instructed an aide to hand Wallace a chart that would supposedly prove his point. “I hope you show this because it shows what fake news is all about,” Trump told Wallace, who quickly refuted the claim.

“The US ranked seventh, better than the United Kingdom but worse than Brazil and Russia,” Wallace explained to viewers, referring to numbers provided by John Hopkins University. Wallace noted that the White House had provided a “chart from the European CDC,” which showed “Italy and Spain doing worse [than the United States] but countries like Brazil and South Korea doing better. Other countries doing better, like Russia, aren’t included in the White House chart.”

"Ready? Will you please get me the mortality rate? Kayleigh is right here… I heard we have the best mortality rate" – the WH just flat out made up a chart to create a false impression that the US has the best mortality rate in the world during Trump's interview w/ Chris Wallace pic.twitter.com/yw8QGBTRVs

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 19, 2020

“They have the sniffles.”

Throughout the interview, Trump repeatedly and falsely blamed increased testing capabilities for the rise in coronavirus cases. 

“But sir, testing is up 37 percent,” Wallace said. “Cases are up 194 percent. It isn’t just that the testing has gone up, it’s that the virus has spread. The positivity rate has increased.”

“Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day,” Trump said. “They have the sniffles and we put it down as a test…many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases.”

While it’s true that the cases among young people are rising, the president’s claim that the situation is somehow less dangerous is disingenuous, as young people are able to spread the virus to more vulnerable demographics, including elderly people and people with underlying health conditions. 

“I’ll have to see.”

Stepping away from the pandemic for a moment, Trump declined to say whether he would accept the results of the November presidential election. “I have to see,” he said. “I’m not just going to say yes.”

Though he gave a similar response back in 2016, the possibility of Trump refusing a peaceful transition carries considerable more seriousness, as he’s now the incumbent. 

“You couldn’t answer many of the questions.”

Trump, while bashing the competence of Joe Biden, did not appear to take well to Wallace’s assessment that the cognitive test the president recently claimed to have “aced” wasn’t all that challenging. 

“Incidentally, I took the [cognitive] test, too, when I heard you passed it. It’s not the hardest test,” Wallace said. “It shows a picture, and it says, ‘What’s that?’ And it’s an elephant.”

Clearly offended, Trump shot back, “I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions.”

It only got dumber from there:

“It’s not the hardest test. It shows a picture, and it says, ‘What’s that?’ And it’s an elephant.”

Watch Trump melt down after Chris Wallace tells him that his cognitive test is pretty easy to pass: https://t.co/xSMchzC2RX pic.twitter.com/OL9lSpXbDd

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 19, 2020

For a look back at Trump’s disastrous handling of the coronavirus pandemic:

In a blistering op-ed published in the Washington Post Thursday, Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, blasted the Trump administration’s failure to recognize the threat the coronavirus posed to the United States or to formulate an adequate plan to combat it.

Hogan, who is reportedly considering a run for president in 2024, wrote that the lack of a comprehensive coronavirus response plan in the United States led him to coordinate a shipment of half a million test kits from South Korea in April—a decision for which President Trump publicly criticized him.

“I’d watched as the president downplayed the outbreak’s severity and as the White House failed to issue public warnings, draw up a 50-state strategy, or dispatch medical gear or lifesaving ventilators from the national stockpile to American hospitals,” Hogan wrote. “Eventually, it was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation’s response was hopeless; if we delayed any longer, we’d be condemning more of our citizens to suffering and death.”

As it turned out, Maryland wasn’t able to make immediate use of the South Korean test kits because the state lacked other necessary testing components, such as nasal swabs and reagents, the Washington Post reports. Hogan’s purchase drew criticism from domestic manufacturers, who argued that the test kits he secured were not in short supply in the United States, and were available for less than he paid.

Hogan’s op-ed makes no note of the delays Maryland faced in deploying its tests, but it does note the “jarring” disparity between Trump’s flippant attitude toward the coronavirus at the beginning of the outbreak and the urgent warnings public health officials delivered to the National Governors Association in early February. “Instead of listening to his own public health experts,” Hogan wrote, “the president was talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his reelection plans.”

As the world grapples with the devastation of the coronavirus, one thing is clear: The United States simply wasn’t prepared. Despite repeated warnings from infectious disease experts over the years, we lacked essential beds, equipment, and medication; public health advice was confusing, and our leadership offered no clear direction while sidelining credible health professionals and institutions. Infectious disease experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before the next pandemic hits, and that could be even more deadly. So how do we fix what COVID has shown was broken? In this Mother Jones series, we’re asking experts from a wide range of disciplines one question: What are the most important steps we can take to make sure we’re better prepared next time around?

Tom Frieden knows the ins and outs of the American public health system—he served as head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under President Obama from 2009-2017. As the pandemic wore, he became increasingly frustrated by the red tape that held up the implementation of an effective plan. So Frieden, who now runs the global healthcare nonprofit Resolve to Save Lives, proposed a new way of funding projects that are critical to Americans’ health. In an early May hearing of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, Frieden introduced a funding mechanism he calls Health Defense Operations. Under this budget, pandemic response projects would be exempt from budget caps, in much the same way as the United States treats additional funding to protect its armed forces. A key part of the plan: Public health experts would be allowed to ask Congress directly for appropriate funding. “Congress and the American people must understand exactly what is needed for our public health defense so that Congress can then appropriate the resources required to sustain the public health system we need to keep us safe and healthy,” wrote Frieden in a letter to Congress in May. “This is the only way we will ensure we are prepared for the next pandemic.”

On why we need a new way to fund a swift response to pandemics: Even if you’ve got a great project, it has to do battle with every other program within an agency, and every other program within the whole government. It goes up to the larger agency like Health and Human Services and does battle with really wonderful programs like Head Start, or cancer research. And then it makes it over to the Office of Management and Budget, where some 27-year-old, who’s never run a program, makes the budget spreadsheet add up. And then it gets turned over to Congress, which pretty much ignores all of that, and bases this year’s budget on last year’s— plus or minus a little bit here or there. 

We have a new idea, which is to make some of the health defense operations budget-cap exempt. That requires what’s called a bypass professional judgment, which means that the experts in an area are the ones who actually provide information on what is needed in that area. The health defense operations idea is really a new idea. We’re encouraged that we have support from a wide group, as well as bipartisan support in the House. And we’re just beginning conversations with the Senate.

On why public health agencies must be allowed to act independently of the White House: It’s naive to say, “We should insulate public health from politics.” It doesn’t happen. All public health positions have a political component. But are there ways to avoid the kind of catastrophic malfunctioning that occurred over the past few months, and that is continuing to occur here in the United States. When I look around the world, one interesting model is in the United Kingdom: They have a chief medical officer who is appointed for a term that spans administrations. You can imagine a system that appointed either the CDC director or someone else and had that individual for a five-year renewable term, so they would span administrations and, in theory, be less, less reluctant to speak out. That happens in the UK. The problem is that there are lots of things that an administration can do to someone besides tell them to be quiet. They can cut their budget, for example.

On why we need to make it easier to track people down in our healthcare system—without compromising their privacy. Fundamentally, it’s very hard to know who is who in our healthcare system. So if John Smith comes in with a COVID test that’s positive, and says he exposed eight people, it’s really hard to find him and other people. That is something that has to be addressed in a way that is entirely transparent to people and protects confidentiality and privacy, and doesn’t lead to people avoiding care if, for example, their immigration is status is not clear. We don’t have that, and it’s one of the fundamental problems in why we have trouble with infectious disease outbreaks.

On why we need to scale up our global work: This is very important. One of the things that my organization does is advocate for funding for global health security and help countries actually spend that money well—because ultimately, most of the threats will come from elsewhere. And it will be both cheaper and more effective to stop them at the source rather than wait until they get to our shores. If countries are stronger, then we’re safer here. 

On the CDC: Blaming the CDC is like blaming a person who has been bound and encased in cement for failing to swim. CDC has not communicated on this well because they have not been allowed to communicate with us. And anyone who doesn’t understand that doesn’t understand how government works. CDC would have loved to be giving daily briefings with one of the top experts. And they did that. And it said exactly what was happening exactly when it was happening in exactly the right language. On January 26, Nancy Messonier said, we have to act, we have to behave as if this is a pandemic. On February 26, she said, disruption to our everyday lives may be severe. This was exactly right, exactly the right thing to say, at exactly the right time. And they were basically told to be quiet after that. So I think that the issue is not so much: “Why didn’t CDC do what it was supposed to do?” But “Why wasn’t CDC allowed to do what it could have done?”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

As the world grapples with the devastation of the coronavirus, one thing is clear: The United States simply wasn’t prepared. Despite repeated warnings from infectious disease experts over the years, we lacked essential beds, equipment, and medication; public health advice was confusing; and our leadership offered no clear direction while sidelining credible health professionals and institutions. Infectious disease experts agree that it’s only a matter of time before the next pandemic hits, and that one could be even more deadly. So how do we fix what COVID-19 has shown was broken? In this Mother Jones series, we’re asking experts from a wide range of disciplines one question: What are the most important steps we can take to make sure we’re better prepared next time around?

Nahid Bhadelia is an infectious disease physician and medical director of special pathogens unit at Boston Medical Center. For the last nine years, she has directed the medical response program for Boston University’s maximum containment biosafety level 4 lab, one of only two centers of its kind in the United States—the other one is in Galveston, Texas—equipped to study the most highly contagious and dangerous diseases. During the West African Ebola epidemic that began in 2014, she worked extensively on the ground in affected countries—in 2016, she began working with a research and patient care facility in Uganda dedicated to combating viral hemorrhagic fevers like Ebola. In addition to her work in Boston, she now helps run that facility in partnership with Ugandan doctors and scientists. She also leads a project in Liberia that trains local scientists in emerging infectious disease research.

On the importance of US infectious disease work abroad: Let’s look at the humanitarian aspect and then the selfish aspect. I think the two are related, because the way you stop outbreak clusters of infectious diseases from becoming pandemics is that you catch them early. At the tail end of all international surveillance for infectious diseases are the communities that do not have access to care. And in the majority of these settings, when people have febrile illnesses, they don’t get diagnosed. Everything just gets diagnosed as malaria. The good thing that happened after Ebola was the global health security agenda stuff, which increased investments in setting up diagnostics abroad, setting up response structures abroad, setting up surveillance, so that we get an early warning in some way. The other thing that happened in the aftermath of the Ebola epidemic was that ASPR invested a ton of money in identifying Ebola treatment centers in the United States. They invested in hospitals that are taking care of Ebola patients to make them into the National Emerging Special Pathogen Training and Education Center, a group that evaluates everybody else’s readiness. So that’s the humanitarian reason: We need to catch these outbreaks early.

Here is the selfish reason: If you want to make any headway in figuring out if a medical countermeasure or diagnostic works, you need an outbreak to evaluate these things. If you don’t have a research infrastructure in places where these outbreaks happen, when they happen, you have a really tough time setting up that research in an effective way. You won’t know if something is effective or not unless you can deploy it in an ethical way, where you can actually test efficacy. It helps the country that’s affected, and it helps us. And that’s why the Department of Defense is actually involved a lot across the board in many different interests in many different ways. They have put in an incredible amount of investment, because they recognize that interdependency between the global and the local.

On why we need to scale up hospitals: Over the last five years, all of us involved in this network of biocontainment care have seen how it’s been great to get some training and awareness and infrastructure into place. But it was an infrastructure that was looking at a disease that causes a small cluster of cases with high mortality, not a disease that causes tons of cases, but not as high mortality. A three-bed biocontainment unit is not going to help you in a case like COVID, where you have hundreds of patients coming in. At a lot of conferences, I keep saying, we may be ready for Ebola, but we’re not ready for avian influenza, which is the equivalent of what we’re seeing with COVID right now.

We need to create greater surge capacity at every level, it can’t just be at these specialized centers. It can’t be an investment during that surge, during a pandemic. It needs to be consistent. It has to be devoid of attachment to a political cycle. A small hospital should have at least the same kind of capacity to handle a surge of infectious diseases, the way a large center does. The other thing, which we have so cruelly realized through this experience, is our supply chain. When the whole world’s supply chain all of a sudden gets impacted, there’s no way to be able to resolve it in time. It requires pre-investment in maintaining the supply chain. That means repatriating the supply chain for personal protective equipment or for certain medications. For example, we saw anesthetic for ventilated patients start running out, so we had to switch to other ones. Boston’s having a big epidemic, but so is New York, and everybody’s market is affected at the same time.

On why PPE needs a major reboot: Personal protective equipment is the same stuff we’ve been using for 30-something years. It’s so uncomfortable. How do you listen to the lungs and heart of a patient when you have all this stuff on your head, and you don’t want to use the same stethoscope that’s dirty on a patient? There’s all this intricate stuff that we go through that limits the amount of time the provider can spend time at the bedside. After Ebola, a couple of models came out—there was one Hopkins model for a new sort of [PPE] suit. We try to reduce the number of things you could get to take off because it’s when people take off their personal protective equipment that they’re most likely to infect themselves. The suit basically allows you to take everything off in two steps. It was full clear-face so you could you could see the face of the patient and they could see you, hear you. And it was lightweight and comfortable. There isn’t enough commercial appeal for it. The specialized centers may think they need it, but what other regular hospitals are going to invest in it?

On why doctors aren’t ready to treat infectious diseases: The next bit is training. Infectious diseases have become so specialized and not even appreciated. We require all physicians to go through advanced life support training, even though most will never see a patient who needs it. There’s some training for infection control, like personal protective equipment, but not enough to make them feel comfortable. We, as a medical field, have to invest in making everybody else have higher levels of competency in dealing with highly communicable infectious diseases.

Why isn’t that a bigger part of every curriculum? I think we need to accept the fact that we live in an age of pandemics, that this is going to continue happening, maybe not at the same scale, but we will continue to see these types of threats because that’s the environment we’ve created. This combination of human activity and population and degradation that we’re seeing with natural reservoirs, we’re going to continue to see new diseases spill over.

On why the United States should not pull out of the World Health Organization: WHO is not a perfect organization, but it is the only international infrastructure that we currently have that creates the platform on top of which sovereign nations can collaborate, and share data and technical expertise. There is nothing else like that out there. And so, for us to pull out of that basically means that we need to depend on bilateral relationships with countries you know, or regional organizations. It’s just shooting ourselves in the foot.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One of the most maddening things about the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic was the complete 180 on masks. In the critical early weeks of the crisis, the US Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention balked at telling the general public to wear face coverings, even as residents of other countries embraced them. It was only in April that the CDC reversed itself; although most cloth masks won’t do much to prevent you from catching the virus, studies have shown they dramatically reduce the risk of transmission to others. It’s hard to think about this and wonder what might have been—how many fewer cases, and how many fewer deaths, might there have been if there was a concerted national push to wear masks in early March?

In an appearance on Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” host Margaret Brennan read US Surgeon General Jerome Adams some of his old comments on masks. On March 8th, a maskless Adams told Brennan “masks do not work for the general public. On Twitter a week earlier, he said “Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS.”

“Do you regret saying that?” Brennan asked.

His response was…well, it was a response:

.@Surgenon_General on his past mask guidance that they don’t work for the "general public”@JeromeAdamsMD: "Once upon a time we prescribed cigarettes for asthmatics, and leeches and cocaine and heroine for people as medical treatments, when we learn better we do better" pic.twitter.com/GPe4rnW1tv

— Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) July 12, 2020

“It’s important for people to understand that once upon a time we prescribed cigarettes for asthmatics, and leeches and cocaine and heroine for people as medical treatments,” Adams said. “When we learn better we do better.”

It’s not often you see a public health official compare something he said in March to doctors prescribing cigarettes for asthmatics, but it’s also not often you see anyone in the Trump administration acknowledge they made a mistake.

At least he’s wearing a mask now.

President Donald Trump spent a lot of the last week talking about re-opening public schools in the fall. As the Daily Beast reported, his campaign has done polling on the issue and found that it could be a winning electoral issue for him. The catch is that it’s only a winning electoral issue if people actually trust that you will be able to responsibly reopen schools. For that reason, Trump’s PR push is sort of self-defeating—if you were actually the person who was going to responsibly open public schools, you wouldn’t have just started thinking about it in July.

And, perhaps, you wouldn’t make the point person for all of this Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, DeVos was asked by host Dana Bash to clarify what public-health experts were telling her about “the appropriate level of transmission for a school before it has to shut down.” It’s gets at the big question at the heart of all of this—what’s the plan? Everyone wants schools to reopen. It comes down to whether the conditions on the ground will allow it. Schools aren’t little epidemiology labs; they need guidance.

DeVos, though, acted as if she’d just strolled into home room and found out there was a test that day:

Disastrously embarrassing performance by DeVos this morning. pic.twitter.com/4ZGSpRwItK

— Jamie 😷’Grady ⚡ (@JamieOGrady) July 12, 2020

“Every school should have plans for that situation to be able to pivot and ensure that kids can continue learning, at a distance if they have to for a short period of time,” she said. What’s the plan? The plan is to have plans. It’s a plan plan.

Bash followed up: “Why do you not have guidance…just weeks before you want those schools to reopen,” she wondered, “and what happens if there’s an outbreak?”

“You know, there’s really good examples that have been utilized in the private sector and elsewhere, also with front line workers and hospitals, and all of that data and all of those examples can be referenced by school leaders,” DeVos said.

Again, Bash asked if DeVos—the Secretary of Education—for specifics. And Again, DeVos stopped short of offering any: “Schools should do what’s right on the ground at that time for their students and for their situation.”

What should they base those plans off of? Maybe some day we’ll find out.

The United States had a record-setting coronavirus week: On Friday, there were 68,000 new cases, the seventh record-high total in 11 days. Meanwhile, the first signs are appearing that the number of deaths is starting to rise. Despite the increasingly grim numbers, which in terms of hospital capacity and availability of necessary medical equipment and personal protective gear, are starting to resemble low points of the spring, some states are wavering on whether to issue new orders to stay home or pause reopenings in progress. Texas’ Republican governor Greg Abbott, who previously resisted local efforts to control the virus, announced that if the state’s numbers keep increasing, he would reinstitute an “economic lockdown.” Also on Friday, Atlanta’s Democratic mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, moved to rollback the city’s reopening—though Georgia’s GOP governor Brian Kemp put out a statement noting Lance Bottom’s orders weren’t mandatory.

In Florida, which has been particularly hard-hit, Disney World reopened on Saturday, despite the protests of many employees.

The number of new cases has been rising particularly quickly across the South and West, but President Donald Trump and his political allies have celebrated the fact that the number of reported deaths even in those regions continued to decline. Despite the president’s optimism, many medical experts warned that the number of deaths is typically a lagging indicator. Based on the most recent numbers, those warnings may be coming true as there were 827 deaths on Friday, according to a New York Times database of COVID-19 cases, a 13 percent increase over the last two weeks. 

BREAKING: 188 new deaths reported in Florida. Highest single day toll yet.@CNN

— John Berman (@JohnBerman) July 11, 2020

As recently as Tuesday, Trump was still bragging about how low the United States’ mortality rate was, but has been silent on the issue since: 

“COVID-19 (China Virus) Death Rate PLUNGES From Peak In U.S.” A Tenfold Decrease In Mortality. The Washington Times @WashTimes Valerie Richardson. We have the lowest Mortality Rate in the World. The Fake News should be reporting these most important of facts, but they don’t!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 7, 2020

Despite Florida’s numbers, Disney World stuck to its plan to reopen on Saturday, admitting guests who had pre-registered, to two parks, with greatly reduced limits on number of guests at any one time. To celebrate, Disney released a peppy welcome video, featuring masked employees cleaning:

Cast members are ready to welcome guests back to Walt Disney World Resort.✨ pic.twitter.com/KHwFMTRqfF

— Disney Parks Jobs (@disneyparksjobs) July 11, 2020

But not all employees are pleased with the reopening—a petition created by employees asking management to not reopen has been signed by at least 20,000 people. A handful of other amusement parks also planned to reopen this weekend. 

Amid the record-breaking surge in coronavirus cases, and as parents around the country face the enormous decision of whether to send their children back to school this fall, President Trump on Wednesday threatened to pull federal funding from school districts and dismissed the Centers for Disease Control official guidance on how to safely reopen, because he claimed the requirements were too onerous and costly.

In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2020

I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2020

The extraordinary tweets marked a new chapter in the president’s demands for schools to reopen—a critical component to reopening the economy—while, so far, staying quiet on additional federal funding for sufficient PPE equipment and social distancing measures school administrators have said are essential for safety. Instead, Trump has turned the issue of reopening schools into a political fight, claiming, without evidence, that Democrats prefer to keep schools closed because they believe it to be politically beneficial to them.

“They think it’s going to be good for them politically,” Trump said at a White House event on school reopenings Tuesday. “So they keep the schools closed.  No way.”

But for parents, many of whom are desperate for regular childcare and a return to some semblance of normalcy in the months ahead, Trump’s aggressive push to reopen schools while dismissing CDC guidelines will do little to reassure them that safety is a high priority for a president, who has repeatedly dismissed the threat of COVID-19 and the need for expanded testing by focusing on the economy. 

Furthermore, Trump’s threat to slash federal funding at this crucial juncture would undoubtedly exacerbate the disproportionate effects of the pandemic, with lower-income districts being more reliant on those funds than their wealthier counterparts. Several states are already suing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos over a rule they say unfairly directs relief funds away from public to private schools.

Ever in lockstep with the White House, Fox News this week has also urged schools to reopen, rationalizing the move with the poetic claim that “life is full of risks.”

“Kids should learn that early that life’s full of hurdles, you’ve got to find a way to overcome,” Fox anchor Brian Kilmeade said during a Fox & Friends segment on Wednesday before downplaying the coronavirus threat as “not Ebola.”

“Mostly kids 99.9 percent of kids will not be affected by it at all,” he continued, despite growing evidence that some children can become seriously ill from the virus and can transmit it to adult family members. “This is a risk that has to be taken.”

Brian Kilmeade says schools must re-open in the fall in part because "life is full of risks, kids should learn that early that life is full of hurdles, you've got to find a way to overcome." pic.twitter.com/zamv1HgMwj

— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) July 8, 2020

As she sat on her couch in her house, alone, sick with COVID-19, an unwelcome series of thoughts crept into Erica Bial’s mind. If I die here, she wondered, who would ever notice? How long would the neighbor’s cat take to find me? Bial, a doctor living in Massachusetts, works at Lahey Hospitals northwest of Boston. She was two weeks into her self-imposed isolation with the disease, when it took a turn for the worse on her 45th birthday. “I had been—I thought—getting better,” she said.

Then came the seizure, the shortness of breath, and the feeling of being even more isolated as her symptoms became more serious. Bial, who doesn’t have children and had been furloughed from work, was severed from her usual supportive networks. Fear of infecting her colleagues prevented her from going to the hospital as a patient. “I probably have never gone that long without seeing someone,” she said. “It’s harder on the body than you think.”

After nearly seven weeks, she recovered. But during her illness, she couldn’t shake the question: “If I die alone, who ever will remember that this happened to me, or know why?” Where would she—and other physicians locked in the fight against the disease—be memorialized if they died? She saw no options, so in early April she created a Facebook page that she called COVID-19 Physicians’ Memorial. 

The premise was simple: Create a community of mourning by running a record of announcements about the deaths of US physicians from the coronavirus. A digital graveyard, group-sourced by members of the medical community and close readers of the obituary section. Bial launched the page, informing friends and colleagues. Soon, doctors, next of kin, spouses, patients, random people, reached out to her with requests to share the passing of these physicians. “Within two weeks, it had gone from word of mouth thing with some colleagues and friends to several thousand people,” she said.

The page now has expanded to include about 200 stories. The page testifies to the threat COVID-19 poses to everyone exposed. Herbert Henderson Jr., a medical examiner in Carroll County, South Carolina, was 56 when he died. “So young,” one commenter observed. Another physician who appears on the page, Priya Khanna, who worked at Clara Maass Medical Center in New Jersey, was only 43 when she died in April. Not long after, her father,  Satyender Khanna, a doctor at the same hospital also died from the virus. “What a blow to family and healthcare,” someone wrote. Another observed, “This hurts my heart. Looks so much like my family, could easily be us.” A third simply commented, “Heartache.”

Like the elder Dr. Khanna, many of the physicians memorialized were in their 70s and older. Jennifer Weiss, who is an orthopedic surgeon at Kaiser Permanente Los Angeles Medical Center, contributed two posts to the page: cardiologist Dr. Lawrence Glassberg and retired orthopedic surgeon Dr. Morton Farber. In the caption of Dr. Glassberg’s post, Dr. Weiss wrote, “My cousin was a gentle listener. He inspired me to be a better doctor.” As for Dr. Farber, Weiss recalled his “booming laugh and a comforting presence as a doctor and as a friend.” Both men practiced well into their 80s before they died. “They loved being doctors more than anything on the planet,” Dr. Weiss told me. “My cousin continued to go to work happily in his 80s, knowing he was risking himself.”

Like every other post on the COVID-19 Physicians Memorial, the stories of Dr. Glassberg and Dr. Farber inspired numerous messages of support from well wishers, and anecdotes from former colleagues and patients. “I actually recycled back to their families with these stories,” Weiss said. ‘They’d never have received [them] otherwise.”

Hannah Kotch, a radiologist in New Jersey, was at home in quarantine after COVID-19 exposure when she learned that one of her mentors from her residency at New York’s Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, 62-year-old Dr. Mitch Horowitz, had died of COVID-19. “He died in a horrible and fast way,” she said. “It happened very quickly. He’d just gotten married.” Dr. Kotch had heard about Horowitz’s death through professional social circles. He’d been an excellent teacher and well-respected amongst colleagues, but given the remarkable number of deaths due to COVID-19, she was concerned that his passing was not noticed. “The television just isn’t covering individuals that often, so we rely on word of mouth,” she said. “For me, it was just sharing it with the people who might want to know. I do appreciate that there’s some place where there’s a record—how else are we going to remember this?”

COVID-19 Physicians Memorial is the only online memorial for physicians, but similar sites for other groups have proliferated across social media. For example, one Twitter account, US Healthcare Workers Lost to COVID-19, maintains a running thread of health care workers, from lab technicians and hospital orderlies to nurse practitioners and physicians, who’ve died from the virus. Claire Rezba, a physician in Virginia who runs the thread and also helps to administer Bial’s page, told me she’s seen memorial groups of all kinds appear. “There are even nation-specific immigrant pages,” she said, groups devoted to a specific diaspora in the US, such as Honoring Guyanese Lost to Coronavirus.

Social media has been a venue to grieve and honor loved ones who have died since the first days of Facebook in the early 2000’s. But today, social distancing has made the familiar rituals accompanying death impossible, even as mortality rates from the pandemic skyrocket. Facebook and Twitter have become even more important as places for mourners to gather. “There’s so much unknown and new about this experience,” said Erin Hope Thompson, a clinical psychologist and founder of The Loss Foundation, a UK-based organization that offers support to those who’ve lost love ones to cancer—and now COVID-19. Navigating grief, already an unfamiliar experience for many, becomes even more fraught without the reassurance of familiar rituals. “If you’re not able to do that in the same way, maybe there’s the need to do it in a different way” she said. “And these Facebook pages may be a good example of that.”

Facebook’s comment section is unlikely to provide the necessary support for those who must cope with catastrophic loss, and Thompson worries that over-reliance on it could deprive mourners of something integral to emotional processing along the way. “We’d encourage people to have lots of different kinds of outlets, speaking to somebody—professionally or non-professionally—writing, crying,” she said. “Would I be worried if somebody was just using social media? In the long run, Yes.” Then there are the all the other potential problems with the platform. “It’s a place where people can abuse anonymity,” she said. “There’s a possibility that somebody would be sharing vulnerability in a space that’s not always monitored.” 

For Dr. Bial, her work on the Physician’s Memorial became a blessing and a burden. Even after returning to work, she was spending considerable time poring over death in obituaries, or—as her role shifted from poster to administrator—policing the site for inappropriate, accusatory, political, overly-religious or, in one case, sexually explicit comments. As the page expanded, she met Claire in Maryland, who offered to help administer it and cross share posts from her own Twitter thread.

They became mutual sources of support in the grim tasks they set out for themselves. “There are some nights where I spent a couple hours at night looking for names—that’s not great for your mental health,” Claire told me. “It’s not something most people want talk about, but something I’ve been interested in. It’s nice to have [Erica] taking on the same thing.” 

Eventually the COVID-19 pandemic will end, but not before hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other physicians will have died. But when there is a vaccine, and schools and life return to normal, the digital meeting places that host conversations on death, like Claire’s and Bial’s, will remain—not only as a public record of the human costs of the disease, but also as a new form of acknowledging,  even celebrating, the lives of those who have died. With physical gatherings removed from the equation, there is nowhere else.

The latest jobs report is out—and with 4.8 million jobs added to the economy last month and unemployment falling to 11.1 percent, it’s far better than most economists had expected. It’s encouraging news, to be sure, but joblessness remains higher than at any point during the Great Recession. Furthermore, the report is a bit stale; the data, collected in mid-June, doesn’t reflect the recent decisions by governors across the country to halt reopening plans amid a surge in new coronavirus cases—moves that will very likely end the rehiring trend seen in the past two months.

In other words, any hope for a lasting, robust recovery is a distant one.

But desperate for a win—any win—President Trump on Thursday seized on the news to hold a last-minute press conference where he touted the report as “spectacular” and “historic.” 

“It’s coming back faster, bigger, and better than we ever thought possible,” he said. “These are not numbers made up by me. These are numbers.”

At one point, Trump appeared to acknowledge the country’s exploding numbers of new cases and deaths from COVID-19—the United States marks the fifth straight day of record-breaking case numbers—but dismissed them as mere “fires” that were under control. “It’s got a life,” the president said, referring to the virus. “We’re putting out that life because that’s a bad life we’re talking about.” It was the latest instance of dangerous magical thinking, fueled by an obsession with how he wants the crisis to look from the outside, replacing the consequences of the disorganized, confusing, and ineffectual response from his administration to a dire public health crisis.  

Naturally, Trump ended the press conference on Thursday without taking questions.

As coronavirus cases in Texas surge, Vice President Mike Pence spoke on Sunday at an indoor service at a Dallas megachurch. Gov. Greg Abbott, Housing Secretary Ben Carson, and Sen. John Cornyn, and joined the vice president at First Baptist Dallas for an event dubbed Celebrate Freedom Sunday.

Pastor Robert Jeffress, an ardent supporter of President Donald Trump, called the event “our annual patriotic service” in which his church celebrates “God’s unique blessings on our country.” As of Friday, 2,200 people were expected to worship inside the main sanctuary, with between 1,500 and 2,000 people in overflow rooms across the church’s six-block campus in downtown Dallas. Jeffress told a local news channel that the church would take worshipers’ temperatures and strongly encouraged masks and social distancing.

Have a good time this morning at First Baptist Dallas Church. The wonderful Pastor @robertjeffress will be joined by our GREAT @VP Mike Pence!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2020

Jeffress, an evangelical preacher and Fox News regular, has acted as an informal faith advisor to Trump. He also has a long history of trumpeting racist and homophobic views. In a March sermon entitled, “Is the Coronavirus a Judgement from God?”, he cautioned 90,000 online viewers that while the coronavirus is not mentioned in the Book of Revelation, “All natural disasters can ultimately be traced to sin.”

Pence’s visit to Texas comes as the state is experiencing a post-reopening wave of the coronavirus. Two months ago, Gov. Abbott announced one of the nation’s earliest and quickest reopening plans. But the past two weeks saw record hospitalization rates, with local officials considering using convention centers and stadiums for overflow capacity. In total, there have been around 150,000 COVID-19 cases and 2,400 deaths in Texas.

On Friday, Abbott reversed course on his reopening plan, shutting bars back down, scaling back restaurant capacity to 50 percent, and prohibiting outdoor gatherings of more than 100 people unless local officials approved. “At this time, it is clear that the rise in cases is largely driven by certain types of activities, including Texans congregating in bars,” he said in a press release. “The actions in this executive order are essential to our mission to swiftly contain this virus and protect public health.”

Abbott’s order on Friday exempted churches and other houses of worship, where there is no occupancy limit.

President Trump campaign staffers who attended a recent rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma are being required to get tested for the coronavirus after eight people connected with the re-election bid tested positive, according to a memo obtained by ABC News on Friday.

The memo said explicitly that staffers “are required to obtain a negative COVID-19 test this weekend,” ominously leaving out the fate of staffers who test positive. The staffers who have already tested positive are still working while self-quarantining, according to a report.

Trump campaign staff were informed Friday night via email that all who were in Tulsa for last weekend's rally "are required to obtain a negative COVID-19 test this weekend," according to an email obtained by ABC. Reporting w/ @wsteaks & @Santucci

— Katherine Faulders (@KFaulders) June 27, 2020

Trump defiantly chose to proceed with the campaign rally despite surges in confirmed coronavirus cases across the country. As my colleague Jacob Rosenberg reported, Trump’s campaign didn’t even bother reaching out to local health officials to discuss the health implications of his rally. Oklahoma reported nearly 400 new cases in 24 hours, local news noted on June 26.

In addition to concerns over Trump rallies potentially being hotspots for spreading the virus, the rally had initially been scheduled for Juneteenth, the day celebrating the emancipation of enslaved Black people after the Civil War, in a city in which white mobs massacred a thriving community known as Black Wall Street in 1921. After public outcry, the Trump campaign decided to bump it back by one day. 

Talk about failing to read the room.