As coronavirus cases surge in the U.S. South and West, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored.
“It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the past three weeks and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus routines.
“I can’t imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it’s unsafe,” Wiles said of the U.S.-wide economic reopening. “It’s hard to see how this ends. There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It’s heartbreaking.”
Visitors to the River Walk pass a restaurant that has reopened in San Antonio. (Eric Gay, File)
China’s actions over the past week stand in stark contrast to those of the United States. In the wake of a new cluster of more than 150 new cases that emerged in Beijing, authorities sealed off neighborhoods, launched a mass testing campaign and imposed travel restrictions.
Meanwhile, President Trump maintains that the United States will not shut down a second time, although a surge in cases has persuaded governors in some states, including Arizona, to back off their opposition to mandatory face coverings in public.
Commentators and experts in Europe, where cases have continued to decline, voiced concerns over the state of the U.S. response. A headline on the website of Germany’s public broadcaster read: “Has the U.S. given up its fight against coronavirus?” Switzerland’s conservative Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper concluded, “U.S. increasingly accepts rising covid-19 numbers.”
“The only thing one can say with certainty: There’s nothing surprising about this development,” a journalist wrote in the paper, referring to crowded U.S. beaches and pools during Memorial Day weekend in May.
Some European health experts fear that the rising U.S. caseloads are rooted in a White House response that has at times deviated from the conclusions of leading scientists.
“Many scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on [in the United States], but this didn’t translate into a political action plan,” said Thomas Gerlinger, a professor of health sciences at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. For instance, it took a long time for the United States to ramp up testing capacity.
Whereas the U.S. response to the crisis has at times appeared disconnected from American scientists’ publicly available findings, U.S. researchers’ conclusions informed the actions of foreign governments.
“A large portion of [Germany’s] measures that proved effective was based on studies by leading U.S. research institutes,” said Karl Lauterbach, a Harvard-educated epidemiologist who is a member of the German parliament for the Social Democrats, who are part of the coalition government. Lauterbach advised the German parliament and the government during the pandemic.
Despite its far older population, Germany has confirmed fewer than 9,000 coronavirus-linked deaths, compared with almost 120,000 in the United States. (Germany has about one-fourth of the United States’ population.)
Lauterbach cited in particular the work of Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, whose research with colleagues recently said that forms of social distancing may have to remain in place into 2022. Lipsitch’s work, Lauterbach said, helped him to convince German Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the pandemic will be “the new normal” for the time being, and it impacted German officials’ thinking on how long their strategy should be in place.
Regarding the effectiveness of face masks, Lauterbach added, “we almost entirely relied on U.S. studies.” Germany was among the first major European countries to make face masks mandatory on public transport and in supermarkets.
Lipsitch said Thursday that he was not previously aware of the impact of his research on German decision-making, but he added that he has spoken to representatives of several other foreign governments in recent weeks, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and officials or advisers from Canada, New Zealand and South Korea.
Even though Lipsitch cautioned it was impossible for him to say how or if his conversations influenced foreign governments’ thinking, he credited the overall European response as “science-based and a sincere effort to find out what experts in the field believe is a range of possible scenarios and consequences of decisions.”
Lipsitch said he presented some of his research to a White House group in the early stages of the U.S. outbreak but said the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic did not reflect his conclusions. “I think they have cherry-picked models that at each point looked the most rosy, and fundamentally not engaged with the magnitude of the problem,” he said.
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European researchers dispute that the U.S. government’s reliance on scientists to inform decision-making comes anywhere near the degree to which many European policymakers have relied on researchers.
After consulting U.S. research and German studies, for instance, German leaders agreed to make reopening dependent on case numbers, meaning restrictions snap back or reopening gets put on hold if the case numbers in a given region exceed a certain threshold.
Meanwhile, several U.S. states have reopened despite rising case numbers.
“I don’t understand that logic,” said Reinhard Busse, a health-care management professor at the Technical University of Berlin.
Lauterbach said that even though most Germans disapproved of Trump before the pandemic, even his staunchest critics in Germany were surprised by how even respected U.S. institutions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, struggled to respond to the crisis.
The CDC, for instance, initially botched the rollout of test kits in the early stages of the outbreak.
“Like many other aspects of our country, the CDC’s ability to function well is being severely handicapped by the interference coming from the White House,” said Harvard epidemiologist Lipsitch. “All of us in public health very much hope that this is not a permanent condition of the CDC.”
Some observers fear the damage will be difficult to reverse. “I’ve always thought of the CDC as a reliable and trusted source of information,” said Wiles, the New Zealand specialist. “Not anymore.”
A white supremacist channel on Telegram encouraged followers to incite violence during police brutality protests by ‘shooting in a crowd,’ according to internal DHS memo
Business Insider, by Sonam Sheth , Jun 1, 2020
New York Police Department (NYPD) officers gather during a rally on May 31, 2020 in New York City. Protesters demonstrated for the fourth straight night after video emerged of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, pinning Floyd’s neck to the ground. Floyd was later pronounced dead while in police custody after being transported to Hennepin County Medical Center. Justin Heiman/Getty Images
A white supremacist channel on Telegram encouraged its followers to spark violence to start a race war in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd, Politico reported, citing an internal Department of Homeland Security memo.
Citing the FBI, the note said that two days after Floyd’s death, the channel “incited followers to engage in violence and start the ‘boogaloo’ — a term used by some violent extremists to refer to the start of a second Civil War — by shooting in a crowd.”
One of the messages in the channel called for potential shooters to “frame the crowd around you” for the violence, the note said, according to Politico.
Other media outlets have also reported on white supremacist groups weaponizing protests against police brutality to incite violence.
Meanwhile, several Republican officials, including President Donald Trump, have blamed “antifa” for the violence and some have suggested protesters should be hunted down like terrorists.
Floyd was a 46-year-old black man who died on May 25 after repeatedly saying he could not breathe when a white police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.
The DHS note warning of white supremacist linked violence was circulated among law enforcement officials, Politico reported. Citing the FBI, it said that two days after Floyd’s death, the channel “incited followers to engage in violence and start the ‘boogaloo’ — a term used by some violent extremists to refer to the start of a second Civil War — by shooting in a crowd.”
One of the messages in the channel called for potential shooters to “frame the crowd around you” for the violence, the note said, according to Politico.
On May 29, the note said, “suspected anarchist extremists and militia extremists allegedly planned to storm and burn the Minnesota State Capitol.”
The memo pointed to “previous incidents of domestic terrorists exploiting First Amendment-protected events” as one of the reasons the DHS is keeping an eye out for additional violence by “domestic terrorist actors.”
NBC News also reported on Monday that Twitter had identified a group posing as an “antifa” organization calling for violence in the protests as actually being linked to the white supremacist group Identity Evropa.
Twitter suspended the account, @ANTIFA_US, after it posted a tweet that incited violence. A company spokesperson also told NBC News that the account violated Twitter’s rules against platform manipulation and spam.
These developments come as protests against racism and police brutality continue across the country. Peaceful demonstrations have taken place in more than 75 cities, though some have spiraled into chaos and deadly violence as law enforcement officials use heavy-handed crowd control tactics.
Some protests have involved smaller groups looting businesses and, in a few cases, setting fire to buildings and cars.
On Monday evening, police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters outside the White House gates in Washington, DC, while President Donald Trump delivered remarks in the Rose Garden saying he was “an ally to all peaceful protesters.”
Here is what was happening outside the White House as President Trump was giving his Rose Garden address and saying he is an “ally of all peaceful protestors.” Peaceful protestors being tear gassed outside of the WH gates. I confirmed because I was teargassed along with them. pic.twitter.com/yg0wbSrIXn
Police in Louisville, Kentucky, spraying pepper bullets at protesters. Officers reportedly also shot them at a reporter and cameraman covering the scene.
Trump and some Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have suggested using violence and deploying the US military to tamp down the demonstrations.
On Monday, a Blackhawk helicopter with US Army markings was seen flying low over Washington, DC, in a “show of force” against protesters. The New York Times reported that the helicopter descended to rooftop level, kicked up dirt and debris, and snapped trees that narrowly missed several people.
Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida suggested earlier in the day that protesters demonstrating against police brutality are part of antifa and should be hunted down like terrorists.
“Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?” Gaetz tweeted. Twitter later flagged the post for violating its rules against glorifying violence but left it up because it determined it was in the “public interest” for the tweet to still be accessible, though users cannot like, retweet, or reply to it.
“We need to have zero tolerance for this destruction,” Cotton wrote, calling protesters “Antifa terrorists.”
“And, if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry — whatever it takes to restore order,” he added. “No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.”
“No quarter” is a military term that means a commander will not accept the lawful surrender of an enemy combatant and suggests the captive will instead be killed. The practice is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.
Trump also called for forcefully subduing the protesters just before describing himself as an “ally” to peaceful demonstrators.
At one point, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said, “We have to be careful, but we’ve got to be tough.”
Trump responded: “You don’t have to be too careful, and you have to do the prosecutions.”
“When someone’s throwing a rock, that’s like shooting a gun,” the president said. “We’ve had a couple of people badly hurt with no retribution. You have to do retribution, in my opinion. You have to use your own legal system. But if you want this to stop, you have to prosecute people.”
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