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The news in the US has been dominated by anti-racism protests for the past couple of weeks, but coronavirus is now back in the headlines.

Several states have seen a record number of cases in recent days, leading to fears that the country is experiencing a second wave of infections.

But Vice-President Mike Pence said those fears were "overblown" and accused the media of using "grim predictions" to scare the American people.

So what is going on in the US?

With more than two million coronavirus cases, the US has the highest number of confirmed infections in the world - about a quarter of the global total.

The situation got really bad in late March but by May, cases were declining and most states had begun to ease restrictions put into place to halt the spread of the virus.

The number of new cases rarely fell below 20,000 though, because as some states were bringing their outbreaks under control, others were only just beginning to see flare-ups.

For this reason, the top US health official for infectious diseases, Anthony Fauci, sees the current situation as a continuation of the initial outbreaks.

"People keep talking about a second wave," he told a reporter last week. "We're still in a first wave."

Spikes in cases in those new hotspots mean the country's overall seven-day average has now risen for several days in a row for the first time since cases peaked in early April.

The North East has been by far the worst-hit region, with about a quarter of all US cases and more than a third of all US deaths occurring in the states of New York and New Jersey. But in recent weeks, the region has brought its outbreaks under control.

The South and West of the country, on the other hand, have seen a big rise in the number of infections, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project.

There's no debate over whether cases are going up again, but there is over why.

President Donald Trump blames it on increased testing, telling the Wall Street Journal he thinks "testing is overrated" because "in many ways, it makes us look bad."

The US has conducted more tests than any other country - about 25 million so far - so that does go some way to explaining why it has the highest number of cases in the world, although international comparisons are difficult to make for a number of reasons.

But there's plenty of evidence to suggest the recent rise in infections is down to more than just a higher number of people being tested.

Twice last week, Arizona saw more new cases on its own than the entire nine-state North East region and that's not just down to increased testing.

This is clear when you look at the rate of coronavirus tests that are coming back positive.

If lots of tests are being done and the spread of the virus has been reduced, then the positive case rate would go down too. If the virus is still being spread widely, it goes up.

At the moment the positive case rate is just below 5% nationally, which is the level the World Health Organization recommends countries be at or below for 14 days before they ease restrictions on movement.

But about a third of states are above that level, as the chart below shows, and all of them have reopened to some extent over the last month.

The number of people being hospitalised has also risen in a number of these states, including Texas, where some reopened bars and restaurants are now closing their doors again, reports the Texas Tribune, because of fears over a new surge of cases.

Faced with rising case numbers and an economy that desperately needs to get going again, many public officials are looking to facemasks to help slow the spread of the virus. California, North Carolina and several US cities mandated or urged their use last week.

But masks have become increasingly politicised in recent weeks, with President Trump saying some people wear them primarily to show opposition to him.

Amid all of the fears about new hotspots, the most positive news in the US at the moment is that daily deaths continue to fall.

They peaked back in May when the outbreaks in the Northeast were at their most intense, with New York state alone registering around 1,000 a day. This week, that figure is about 40 a day.

However, deaths is a metric that lags behind cases and hospitalisations because it can take several weeks for those who are worst-hit to die from the disease. That means the consequences of the current spikes in cases won't be seen for a couple of weeks at least.

If we do see the number of deaths edging up, there will likely be some pressure on governors to reintroduce restrictions but Dr Fauci doesn't think that will happen.

"I don't think we're going to be talking about going back to lockdown," he said last week. "I think we're going to be talking about trying to better control those areas of the country that seem to be having a surge of cases."

Researchers are racing to produce a vaccine but it's clear that Americans, and the rest of the world, are going to be living with the virus until next year at the earliest.

So far, the US has recorded about 120,000 coronavirus deaths - the highest death toll in the world.

But one forecasting model run by experts at the University of Washington, which has been cited by the White House in the past, predicts that number will have passed 200,000 by October - a month before the election.

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Coronavirus: Is the pandemic getting worse in the US? - BBC News

What would a President Mike Pence do?

Its a question no one is asking, so I guess it falls to me.

In January 2020 it was almost as if God, the universe or our Lizard People overlords were giving the Republicans one last chance to separate their fate from President Donald Trumps. The Higher Power couldnt actually tell the GOP, If you dont choose wisely, youll be stuck with him during a time of trials, tribulations and even a plague. But its not like they werent warned that the president would one day be tested beyond his abilities. Prophets dont predict, they warn. And such warnings have been thick in the air for a very long time.

But few Republicans heeded, and a complaisance just shy of Stockholm syndrome finally set in. After all, the economy was humming, the normal rules of politics had not applied to this president for so long, and the base was so invested in Trump, best to keep your head down. Sodom and Gomorrah were fun towns while they lasted too.

Like a TV drama that needs to foreshadow the plot twists of the next season, the plague actually started as a subplot of the impeachment drama. Tom Cotton left the Senate trial at one point to lobby the White House to take the strange illness plaguing the Chinese city of Wuhan seriously. It all seems so foreordained in hindsight. Isnt that always the way?

Of course, one might argue that the president shouldnt have been removed from office because he wasnt guilty. But few Republicans, outside the president and his coterie, actually took this position. Most hid behind the claim that the prosecution hadnt made its case, even as the Senate moved to block the prosecution from fully making its case. A handful of senators, led by Lamar Alexander, conceded that Trump did abuse his power by pressuring Ukraine to muddy up Joe Biden, but that his missteps werent worth impeaching him over. As Marco Rubio put it, Just because actions meet a standard of impeachment does not mean it is in the best interest of the country to remove a president from office.

Fair enough. But here we are. And that raises the question: Would we be better off today without President Trump? Those who claimed, quite angrily, that impeachment would have overturned an election always ignored the fact that the 12th Amendment prevents that. Removal would have delivered a President Pence, not a President Hillary Clinton.

Its self-evident that Pence would have handled the pandemic better. His stewardship of the White House coronavirus task force was marked by quiet, assured and reassuring, professionalism. If he hawked hydroxychloroquine or bleach as potential miracle cures, I missed it.

It is true, of course, that whenever given the opportunity to put distance between himself and the president, Pence never does. It feels to me, though, that this is because he is in hostage mode, stoically reciting into the camera whatever his captor has demanded he say. I always look for signs that he is trying to blink the Morse code for TORTURE into the cameras, but so far I havent seen it.

With Pence as president, its unlikely the White House would have launched the Battle of Lafayette Park, nor would Pence have floated conspiracy theories about Joe Scarborough being a murderer or a 75-year-old Buffalo, N.Y., man being an antifa provocateur. More broadly, the policies that Trump enablers claim are the benefits that come with the transactional costs of tolerating or even celebrating the self-destructive drama of his presidency would disappear.

While the country would be in better shape, its hard to know if the GOP would be, at least in the short term. On one hand, post-impeachment Pence surely would have gotten the rally-around-the-leader bump that Trump frittered away (and that nearly all state governors are still enjoying).

On the other hand, Trumps rage-tweeting from his Mar-a-Lago Elba certainly would have created problems for the Republican senators who voted to convict. But the contrast between the staid President Pence and his predecessor might actually help Pence attract the Republican-friendly voters Trump has scared away.

More important, the same binary choice logic constantly used to justify support for Trump would apply. Do you want to give the Democrats total control of government or do you want to hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil?

Obviously, its all spilled milk now. But its a useful mental exercise nonetheless. Because if the suggestion that we would be better off had the Republicans removed Trump from office enrages you beyond your pet theories of the impeachment case against him it might indicate your support of Trump is less transactional than you like to claim.

Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. On Twitter: @JonahDispatch.

Link:
OPINION EXCHANGE | Would we be better off with a President Pence in these turbulent times? - Minneapolis Star Tribune

This Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pencepenned an op-edin The Wall Street Journal where he claimed that alarm bells about a second wave of coronavirus are overblown that the Trump administration is winning the fight against the ongoing health crisis. But this Friday, the Journal ran a fact check on the very op-ed that itself published, saying that Pence overstated the amount of coronavirus-related medical equipment distributed by a Trump administration program on multiple occasions, according to public data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

In his article, Pence praisedProject Airbridge, a public-private partnership championed by Jared Kushner, writing that Project Airbridge delivered more than 143 million N95 masks, 598 million surgical and procedural masks, 20 million eye and face shields, 265 million gowns and coveralls and 14 billion gloves for the fight against coronavirus.

But according to WSJ, thats not accurate.

According to FEMA data,through June 18 the program had delivered1.5 million N95 masks, 113.4 million surgical masks, 2.5 million face shields, 50.9 million gowns, 1.4 million coveralls and 937 million gloves, WSJs Rebecca Ballhaus writes. The total number of those supplies is about 7%or one-thirteenthof the numbers cited in Mr. Pences article.

Read the full fact check over atThe Wall Street Journal.

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Wall Street Journal debunks false claims Mike Pence pushed in the same paper days before - AlterNet

PolitiFact and MediaWise are teaming up to debunk misinformation about the coronavirus crisis. To have Coronavirus Facts delivered to your inbox Monday-Friday, click here.

Its a big weekend for President Donald Trump, as he will be holding his first rally since the U.S. began shutting down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And ahead of the campaign event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have made false claims about the coronavirus.

Trump sought to downplay the numbers associated with the impact of COVID-19 in the United States more than 2 million confirmed cases and nearly 120,000 lives lost by arguing that the soaring national count was simply the result of superior testing.

If you dont test, you dont have any cases, Trump said at a June 15 roundtable discussion at the White House. If we stopped testing right now, wed have very few cases, if any.

Its a talking point the administration is emphasizing. Pence repeated it during a phone call to Republican governors that evening, recommending they use the argument to quiet public concern about surging case tallies in some states. Its also a variation on a tweet the president sent earlier in the day.

With that in mind, PolitiFact wanted to dig deeper. We reached out to the White House for comment or clarification, but we never heard back. Independent researchers told us, though, that the presidents remarks are not only misleading theyre also counterproductive in terms of thinking through whats needed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

Click here to read the full fact-check.

Vice President Mike Pences claim about Oklahoma flattening the coronavirus curve is false. The states daily COVID-19 caseload has risen consistently in June, and to levels higher than at any point in the pandemic. Get the facts

A recent viral TikTok video claims that the U.S. has already patented a cure for the novel coronavirus. The TikTok user even cites a legitimate patent that mentions coronavirus. One problem: Its for a different type of virus in birds. Its Not Legit. Watch the fact-check

Yes. According to the latest survey data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 19.7% of African Americans are in jobs where they could work at home. The fraction was even lower for Hispanics about 16%. The option to work at home was available to 30% of White people and 37% of Asians. Get the facts

Click here to get this newsletter in your inbox every weekday.

Alex Mahadevan is a senior multimedia reporter at MediaWise. He can be reached at amahadevan@poynter.org or on Twitter at @AlexMahadevan. Follow MediaWise on TikTok

Read more:
Trump falsely claims that if 'we stopped testing right now,' we'd have very few COVID-19 cases - Poynter

Vice President Mike Pence discusses President Trump's executive order on police reform.

The executive order on law enforcement reform that President Trump is set to sign on Tuesday is the opposite of "defund the police," a rallying cry for many protesters angered by the death of George Floyd, Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday morning.

"The president will take decisive action," Pence said."He will sign an executive order that will set into motion new resources, new standards on the use of force, a way to be able to track when we see inappropriate use of force and also resources to encourage using other public officials like social workers in interaction with the public. ... We're not going to defund the police, quite the contrary."

GEORGE FLOYD PROTESTERS PUSH TO DEFUND THE POLICE: WHAT IT MEANS

Some say "defund the police"means diverting police department funding to alleviate poverty and therefore reducecrime, while others say it means abolishing police departments entirely.

AnACLU petitioncalling to "divest from the police" had more than 120,000 signatures as of Tuesday morning.

Protesters rally Wednesday, June 3, 2020, in Phoenix, demanding the Phoenix City Council defund the Phoenix Police Department. (AP Photo/Matt York)

"The most recent eruption of protests across the U.S. demanding justice for George Floyd, Dreasjon Reed, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and countless other Black people who have been killed by police has laid bare what we've known for too long:The policing institutions in our country are deeply entrenched in racism and brutality, and we cannot allow it to continue," the petition reads.

Pence reiteratedthe Trump administration's stance on Floyd's death in police custody in Minneapolis.

"What happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis was a national tragedy and a disgrace," Pence said Tuesday.

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Police reform executive order will be opposite of 'defund the police': Pence - Fox Business