US President Donald Trump on Tuesday admitted that the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to “get worse before it gets better” at his first news briefing devoted to the issue since April.
Facing dire poll numbers, surging cases and sharp criticism for a lack of leadership, Trump returned to the White House podium attempting to show more discipline in style and substance.
In several notable reversals, he urged people to wear masks and promised that his administration was working on a “strategy.”
Trump wrapped up in less than half an hour, avoiding his digressions in past briefings that culminated in a proposal to inject patients with disinfectant.
The pandemic would “probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better,” Trump said, reading from scripted remarks. “Something I don’t like saying about things, but that’s the way it is.”
It was a marked shift from his claims last month that the virus was “fading away” and “dying out.”
Having once dismissed its remnants as “embers,” he conceded that COVID-19 is now raging in states led by Republican governors.
“We have embers and fires and we have big fires, and unfortunately now, Florida is a little tough or in a big tough position,” he said. “You have a great governor there, great governor in Texas.”
The White House has been widely condemned for failing to lead with a national strategy, instead shifting responsibility to state governors.
Among the problems is a lack of infrastructure to process and trace test results, leaving people waiting seven days or longer.
“We are in the process of developing a strategy that’s going to be very, very powerful. We have developed it as we go along,” Trump said.
After months of refusing to wear a mask in public, Trump finally did so on July 11 and has since claimed it is patriotic to wear protective equipment.
“We’re asking everybody that when you are not able to socially distance, wear a mask,” Trump said. “Get a mask, whether you like the mask or not, they have an impact. They’ll have an effect, and we need everything we can get.”
Producing a mask from his suit pocket, he added: “I carry the mask... I have the mask right here. I carry it and I will use it gladly.”
However, the belated appeal was insufficient to placate the president’s critics.
“This is three months too late and 30 or 40,000 lives lost too late,” Heather McGhee, cochair of the civil rights group Color of Change, told the MSNBC network.
Despite the more subdued and realistic tone, Trump also offered upbeat words, suggesting a reduction in deaths and progress on vaccines and treatments for COVID-19.
“The vaccines are coming, and they’re coming a lot sooner than anybody thought possible,” Trump said.
Trump also repeatedly used the term “China virus” and recycled his promise that one day “it will disappear.”
More than 3.9 million cases have been reported in the US, including more than 142,000 deaths.
The briefing was the latest of several attempts to relaunch Trump’s public response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
He was not joined by US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, who had told an interviewer he was not invited, nor by White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx, who Trump said was “right outside” the room.
Critics have suggested that briefings have returned, albeit in a different form, in an attempt to dominate the media limelight at the expense of former US vice president Joe Biden, Trump’s presumptive Democratic challenger.
Asked whether he thinks Americans should judge him in November on his handling of the pandemic, Trump said: “This, among other things. I think the American people will judge us on this, but they’ll judge us on the economy that I created.”
Earlier on Tuesday, Biden reiterated his criticism of Trump’s response to the pandemic.
“His own staff admits that Donald Trump fails the most important test of being the American president: the duty to care — for you, for all of us,” Biden said. “He has quit on you and he has quit on this country.”
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