The chart above isn’t accurate. It’s not accurate in the sense that by the time it was made on Tuesday evening, the number of cases had already climbed to 994. On Wednesday morning, it’s already at 1,015 … and that will only stand up for a matter of minutes. It’s not possible to make an accurate chart of something that’s moving as fast as the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 within the United States.
Meanwhile, the quotes on the chart don’t begin to cover the reality of the messaging coming out of the White House. There wasn’t room at the top of the chart for the latest message from Donald Trump. As CBS reports, Trump saved his most incongruous, most disconnected-from-reality message for a coronavirus press appearance on Tuesday afternoon.
"It will go away, just stay calm," said Trump. "Be calm. It's really working out. And a lot of good things are going to happen."
No. Good things are not going to happen. The coronavirus isn’t just spreading rapidly; it has already spread widely. A massively undersupported testing program hasn’t even begun to probe the extent to which, in both area and numbers, the United States has been overrun by the 2019 novel coronavirus. That state officials have logged so many cases in 38 states at a point when testing has barely begun shows that the nation is farther up the curve toward a full-bore epidemic than anyone wanted to accept—and that is information the White House refuses to acknowledge.
Trump’s entire view of the outbreak is focused on how it is affecting the stock markets. The Tuesday press event included both Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and economic adviser Larry Kudlow talking about all the “fantastic” economic actions that would be taken—such as a payroll tax cut that will do absolutely nothing for workers in an economy increasingly dominated by jobs that treat them as independent contractors, and government funds directed to industries like oil shale that were failing long before the virus first appeared.
Meanwhile, state officials are reporting that they still lack adequate test kits, people are getting nothing like adequate preparation for what’s ahead, and the White House appears to be doing nothing to arrange for the hundreds of thousands of additional hospital beds that are going to be an absolute necessity to avoid the disaster that is costing lives in northern Italy.