Donald Trump hasn’t just failed to slow the spread of the coronavirus in the United States. He has actively sped it along.
Trump’s ego demands campaign rallies, and his ego demands pretending COVID-19 is not a problem, and that has led to increasing virus rates in many of the places he’s held his crowded, mask-deficient events. A CNN investigation finds that 82% of the counties that hosted Trump rallies included in the analysis saw increased coronavirus rates. This follows a USA Today analysis that similarly found increasing COVID-19 rates following Trump rallies.
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Seventeen rallies. Fourteen counties with increases.
CNN looked at the virus levels in the counties for four weeks before and four weeks after the rally, and compared them with state levels also.
In eight of the counties, infection rates had been declining until Trump came to town. In six, infection rates had been increasing, but sped up even more after Trump’s rally. Ten of the counties showed faster growth of infection rates in the county than in the state as a whole.
For instance, in the month before Trump’s Sept. 12 rally in Minden, Nevada, rates were falling, “But four weeks after the event, the rate of new cases in the county skyrocketed by 225%, outpacing the 74% increase the rest of the state experienced in the same time period.”
But Trump doesn’t care, because his ego is all that matters. For the final days of the campaign, he’s planning a marathon series of rallies: five in Pennsylvania, three in Michigan, two in North Carolina, one in Florida, one in Georgia, one in Iowa, and one in Wisconsin.