The White House has grown increasingly confident that the public believes President Donald Trump has the pandemic under control, but some Republicans are increasingly concerned about the growing death toll.
The president's top political aides are feeling better and better about their response to the coronavirus crisis, despite persistent delays in testing results and 1,000 deaths per day, reported Politico.
“COVID is the White House’s focus right now,” one senior White House official told the website. “Our data was showing it was beginning to subside in late May and early June. As the public started giving up on many of the mitigation practices, we had to adapt.”
One former senior administration official said the White House is trying to look like they're in control, although the pandemic continues to wreak havoc on the economy and daily life, and even some Republicans say the administration remains wildly out of step with reality.
“I would say that they are comparing things to where they were previously,” said one senior Republican who's close to the White House. “When you compare a disaster to an outright disaster, the disaster does not seem so bad.”
“I don’t feel like they kind of know what ‘under control’ would look like,” that official added. “They are doing their best. It is just one of those situations. I don’t feel like even they know what the goal is.”
Some of the president's allies have questioned whether it was a good idea to resume his daily coronavirus briefings, where Trump repeatedly assures the public the virus will eventually "disappear," but White House officials insist those are helpful to his re-election chances.
“President Trump has led an historic, whole-of-America coronavirus response — resulting in 100,000 ventilators procured, sourcing critical PPE for our frontline heroes and a robust testing regime resulting in more than double the number of tests than any other country in the world,” said White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews. “This leadership will continue as we reopen the economy, expedite development of a vaccine and therapeutics and continue to see an encouraging decline in the U.S. mortality rate.”
But some of the president's allies agree the administration made matters worse by downplaying the threat from COVID-19 and pushing states to reopen too soon, and they doubt the president can talk his way out of the ballooning crisis.
“It doesn’t do a whole lot for clarity for the general public or confidence-building,” said one outside adviser. “His leadership style and his model do not always invite a multifaceted approach.”
The number of deaths in the United States through July 2020 is 8% to 12% higher than it would have been if the coronavirus pandemic had never happened. That’s at least 164,937 deaths above the number expected for the first seven months of the year – 16,183 more than the number attributed to COVID-19 thus far for that period – and it could be as high as 204,691.
Tracking deaths
When someone dies, the death certificate records an immediate cause of death, along with up to three underlying conditions that “initiated the events resulting in death.” The certificate is filed with the local health department, and the details are reported to the National Center for Health Statistics.
To calculate excess deaths requires a comparison to what would have occurred if COVID-19 had not existed. Obviously, it’s not possible to observe what didn’t happen, but it is possible to estimate it using historical data. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does this using a statistical model, based on the previous three years of mortality data, incorporating seasonal trends as well as adjustments for data-reporting delays.
So, looking at what happened over the past three years, the CDC projects what might have been. By using a statistical model, they are also able to calculate the uncertainty in their estimates. That allows statisticians like me to assess whether the observed data look unusual compared to projections.
The number of excess deaths is the difference between the model’s projections and the actual observations. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also calculates an upper threshold for the estimated number of deaths – that helps determine when the observed number of deaths is unusually high compared to historical trends.
Clearly visible in a graph of this data is the spike in deaths beginning in mid-March 2020 and continuing to the present. You can also see another period of excess deaths from December 2017 to January 2018, attributable to an unusually virulent flu strain that year. The magnitude of the excess deaths in 2020 makes clear that COVID-19 is much worse than influenza, even when compared to a bad flu year like 2017-18, when an estimated 61,000 people in the U.S. died of the illness.
The large spike in deaths in April 2020 corresponds to the coronavirus outbreak in New York and the Northeast, after which the number of excess deaths decreased regularly and substantially until July, when it started to increase again. This current uptick in excess deaths is attributable to the outbreaks in the South and West that have occurred since June.
The data tell the story
It doesn’t take a sophisticated statistical model to see that the coronavirus pandemic is causing substantially more deaths than would have otherwise occurred.
The number of deaths the CDC officially attributed to COVID-19 in the United States exceeded 148,754 by Aug. 1. Some people who are skeptical about aspects of the coronavirus suggest these are deaths that would have occurred anyway, perhaps because COVID-19 is particularly deadly for the elderly. Others believe that, because the pandemic has changed life so drastically, the increase in COVID-19-related deaths is probably offset by decreases from other causes. But neither of these possibilities is true.
In fact, the number of excess deaths currently exceeds the number attributable to COVID-19 by more than 16,000 people in the U.S. What’s behind that discrepancy is not yet clear. COVID-19 deaths could be being undercounted, or the pandemic could also be causing increases in other types of death. It’s probably some of both.
Regardless of the reason, the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in substantially more deaths than would have otherwise occurred … and it is not over yet.
A new report from the New York Times documents how Trump's aggressive push to force schools back open without offering a plan to do so safely has only hardened opposition from teachers unions who have complained that the current state of the pandemic makes going back to class too risky to their members' health.
LeeAnne Power Jimenez, the vice president of the Tulsa Classroom Teachers Association and a member of the state union’s Republican caucus, tells the Times that she has been "frustrated" by Trump's approach to schools, which she said appeared to be driven more by political considerations than public health policy.
"[We] need to hear that our lives are important," she said.
Rick Hess, the director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, similarly tells the Times that Trump's angry tweets about opening schools were the perfect weapon that teachers unions could use to make their arguments about staying closed.
"If you had told me that Trump was doing this as a favor to the schools-must-not-open crowd, I’d believe you," he joked. "I thought it was really good and useful to have someone with a big megaphone make those arguments... but he made them in such a five-thumbed, unserious, reckless way."
The Philippines will begin large-scale human testing of Russia's coronavirus vaccine in October, but President Rodrigo Duterte will not receive the inoculation until regulators guarantee its safety, his spokesman said Thursday.
Duterte had offered himself up as a guinea pig for the very first jab, expressing "huge trust" in the vaccine, despite growing skepticism about its effectiveness.
But his spokesman Harry Roque said the president was scheduled to receive the vaccine no earlier than May 1 -- weeks after the Russian-funded Phase 3 clinical trial in the archipelago is due to end in March.
The country's Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve the vaccine -- developed by the Gamaleya research institute and the Russian defense ministry -- in April.
"May 1 is when the PSG (presidential security group) may allow him, once all requisite tests have been finished," Roque told reporters.
Moscow says it has developed the world's first vaccine offering "sustainable immunity" against the coronavirus and is in the final stage of tests involving 2,000 people.
Roque said Philippine experts will review next month the results of Russia's Phase 1 and 2 clinical trials before the Southeast Asian country starts its Phase 3 testing.
"We will do it simultaneously with Russia," Roque said.
Philippine officials from the science and technology department met with Gamaleya on Wednesday to discuss the protocols for the trial of the vaccine, which is dubbed "Sputnik V" after the pioneering Soviet satellite of the 1950s.
The Philippines, which is struggling to contain the virus, has accepted Russia's offer to participate in production of the vaccine.
Anna Lisa Ong-Lim, an infectious disease professor at the University of the Philippines College of Medicine, said the government's timeline to have a vaccine available by May was "very optimistic".
The country is also set to start on August 17 clinical trials for the Japanese antiviral drug Avigan to treat coronavirus patients.
The Philippines has logged the highest number of confirmed infections in Southeast Asia with more than 147,500 cases and over 2,400 deaths.
Jasmine Obra believed that if it wasn’t for her brother Joshua, she wouldn’t exist. When 7-year-old Josh realized that his parents weren’t going to live forever, he asked for a sibling so he would never be alone.
By spring 2020, at ages 29 and 21, Josh and Jasmine shared a condo in Anaheim, California, not far from Disneyland, which they both loved.
Both worked at a 147-bed locked nursing facility that specialized in caring for elderly people with cognitive issues such as Alzheimer’s, where Jasmine, a nursing student, was mentored by Josh, a registered nurse.
Both got tested for COVID-19 on the same day in June.
Both tests came back positive.
Yet only one of them survived.
While COVID-19 takes a far deadlier toll on elderly people than on young adults, an investigation of front-line health care worker deaths by the Guardian and KHN has uncovered numerous instances when staff members under age 30 were exposed on the job and also succumbed.
In our database of 167 confirmed front-line worker deaths, 21 medical staffers, or 13% of the total, were under 40, and eight (5%) fatalities were under 30. The median age of a COVID-19 death in the general population is 78, while the median age of health care worker deaths in the database is 57. This is in part because we are, by definition, including only people of working age who were treating patients during the pandemic — but it is also because, as health workers, they are far more exposed to the virus.
Young health care workers are at a “stage in their career and a stage of life at which they have so much more to offer,” said Andrew Chan, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. “Lives lost among any young people related to COVID really should be considered something that’s unacceptable to us as a society.”
As coronavirus cases surge — and dire shortages of lifesaving protective gear like N95 masks, gowns and gloves persist — the nation’s health care workers face disproportionate risk. Chan’s research has found that health care workers of any age are at least three times more likely to become infected than the general population, and the risk is greater if they are people of color or have to work without adequate personal protective equipment. People of color are also likelier to have inadequate access to PPE.
In interviews, relatives and friends of these younger victims described a particular and wrenching sorrow. Everything lay ahead for these front-line workers. They were just embarking on their careers. Some still lived in the family home; others were looking forward to getting married or had young children. Several parents of victims contacted by the Guardian and KHN said they were simply unable to talk about what had happened, so immense was their grief.
Some of the health care workers under 30 who have died from COVID-19:
Valeria Viveros, a 20-year-old nursing assistant, was “barely blooming,” said her uncle, Gustavo Urrea. She made ceviche for her patients at a nursing home in Riverside, California, and Urrea could see her visibly growing in self-confidence. When she first fell sick from the virus, she went to the hospital but was sent home with Tylenol. She returned several days later in an ambulance — her final journey.
“We’re all destroyed,” Urrea said. “I can’t even believe it.”
Dulce Garcia, 29, an interpreter at a medical facility in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, died in May. “It just doesn’t feel real,” said friend Brittany Mathis. Garcia was the one who wouldn’t let friends drive if they’d had too many drinks, and she loved going out to dance to bachata, merengue and reggaeton. “There were so many things she had unfinished,” Mathis said.
While people of any age with underlying conditions such as diabetes and obesity are at higher risk of a severe COVID-19 infection, the particular impacts of the virus on young adults are only now becoming clear.
Doctors in New York noticed that more younger patients than usual were presenting with strokes, to the point that “the average age of our stroke patients with large-vessel strokes” — the most devastating kind — “has come down,” said Thomas Oxley, a Mount Sinai medical system neurosurgeon. COVID-19 infections cause inflammation, and often blood clots, in blood vessels as well as the lungs.
Angela Padula and Dennis Bradt became engaged in early February. On May 13, Bradt died of a heart attack as doctors tried to coax him off a ventilator.(Angela Padula)
Angela Padula thought that she and Dennis Bradt had done everything right.
Padula, 27, and Bradt, 29, became engaged on Feb. 8. She was a special-education teacher, and he was an addiction technician at Conifer Park, a private addiction treatment facility in Glenville, New York.
The couple wanted to save up for a few years for their wedding, but by early April, they had already purchased her engagement and wedding rings. Bradt, who had the sweeter tooth, had chosen a raspberry-swirl wedding cake.
After the pandemic hit, Bradt started showering when he got home from work. He and Padula wore masks when they went out, which was usually only for groceries or gas. They stopped visiting their immunocompromised parents.
On April 5, Bradt came down with a fever, stomach-bug symptoms and achiness, and went to the hospital. His COVID-19 test came back negative. Soon he couldn’t breathe. Another test proved positive. On April 16 he was put on a ventilator. In the process, he choked on his own vomit, which caused his lung to collapse.
Padula assumes Bradt was infected at work, and is unsure whether he had sufficient PPE. Conifer Park did not respond to queries, but according to local health authorities, 12 employees and six patients at the facility tested positive for COVID-19. Padula herself had symptoms so severe that she was taken to the emergency room in an ambulance.
She was not allowed to visit Bradt, and was quarantined alone at home, where she spent her 28th birthday, taking anxiety medication prescribed by her doctor.
On May 13, as doctors tried to coax Bradt off the ventilator, he suffered a heart attack, Padula said. She and Bradt’s mother were permitted to say goodbye to him. But “he was gone by the time we got there,” Padula said in an interview. “He didn’t look like himself,” swollen and festooned with tubes.
Today Padula is still sick. Pain in her arms, legs and back wakes her at night. She feels as though the virus has taken over her life.
“I have my days where it’s just too much to think about,” she said. “I’ll see people getting engaged on Facebook — it makes me mad. I want to be happy for them, but it’s very difficult for me to be happy. We were planning on having kids in a couple years.”
“It’s been a tough month for all of us,” Josh Obra wrote in an Instagram caption less than two months before he fell ill. “It’s just mentally exhausting thinking each night when I come home that I may be having symptoms the next day.”(The Obra family)
Less than two months before Josh and Jasmine Obra fell ill, Josh posted two pictures to Instagram: One was a photo of a fireworks display at Disneyland; the other was a picture of himself in medical scrubs, wearing a face mask, giving the peace sign.
“Heeeeeyo! It’s been a minute,” he wrote in the caption. “It’s been a tough month for all of us.” He worked with a vulnerable population, he said, and “it’s just mentally exhausting thinking each night when I come home that I may be having symptoms the next day.”
Even so, Josh was the kind of helpful, empathetic nurse who “makes things easier for everybody,” said colleague Sarah Depayso. He knew how to talk to patients and was attuned to others’ stress levels. “We were so busy, and it was ‘I’ll buy you lunch, I’ll buy you dinner, I’ll buy you boba.’”
It had been about 35 days since Disneyland closed its gates, Josh noted in his post. Josh’s photos — of the Sleeping Beauty castle framed by tabebuia blossoms, or of himself in an attention-grabbing Little Mermaid sweater — and corny jokes endeared him to thousands of followers on Instagram. “He had a way of capturing magic,” said his friend Brandon Joseph. The pictures were joyful, like memories of childhood.
Josh’s last post was on June 10, announcing that Disneyland planned to reopen in July. At some point the virus had reached his nursing home, infecting 49 staff members and 120 residents and ultimately killing 14 people. Approximately 41% of all U.S. coronavirus deaths are linked to nursing homes, where frail people live in close quarters, according to The New York Times.
After taking the virus test on June 12, his health deteriorated. On June 15, he messaged Joseph that he couldn’t take a full breath of air without feeling like he was being knifed in the chest. On June 20, he texted that he was at the hospital and that he had a particularly bad case.
The final time Josh spoke with his family, before he was put on a ventilator, was on June 21. “On our last video call together, I was isolated in Anaheim, quarantined, and our parents were at home,” Jasmine said. It was Father’s Day, “and I remembered crying and crying because this was the reality of what our family was.”
Josh’s family was not permitted to visit him in the hospital, and he died on July 6.
By coincidence, Josh, like his grandparents, was buried in the same cemetery as Walt Disney — Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
Before the funeral, Jasmine walked over to Disney’s grave, she said. “I was like, ‘Hi, Walt. I hope you and my brother found each other.’”
Every night since he died, Jasmine has watched Southern California’s spectacular sunsets, the pinks and yellows that Josh kept returning to in his pictures. “And every time I feel like he’s with me. I look at the sky and sometimes I start talking to it, and I feel like I’m talking to my brother, and that he’s painting beautiful skies.”
Melissa Bailey, Eli Cahan, Shoshana Dubnow and Anna Sirianni contributed to this report.
This story is part of “Lost on the Frontline,” an ongoing project by The Guardian and KHN (Kaiser Health News) that aims to document the lives of health care workers in the U.S. who die from COVID-19, and to investigate why so many are victims of the disease. If you have a colleague or loved one we should include, please share their story.
If President Donald Trump sounds like he's mindlessly rattling off random facts and figures on a monotone voice while reading another script that sounds like the same script before, there's a reason for that. The scripts have been almost identical on multiple occasions.
The Recount showed a mash-up of several different videos of Trump reading the exact same words about the COVID-19 pandemic and the United States "conducting more tests than any other country in the world." He also cites the exact same phrase for talking about the elderly dying of the coronavirus and how they can fast-track the vaccine for 100 million of the 330 million Americans in the United States.
While Trump is quoted more frequently for his Q&A session of the press briefing, there's a reason that the intro of the press conference has been ignored: it's too similar to previous briefings.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — One morning at breakfast six years ago, as Dawn Sticklen’s healthy 13-year-old son tried to eat a bowl of cereal, his arms started shaking and got so weak he couldn’t feed himself.“We thought maybe it was because he had been sick for a few days and maybe he was just kinda weak from not eating properly,” said Sticklen, who lives in Joplin.“But he just kept saying it was getting harder and harder to move his arms. So we knew something was wrong. We got him in to see the doctors and they all were like, ‘this doesn’t look right.’ ”Joplin doctors sent the family to Children’s Mer...
A Florida sheriff ordered his officers to not wear face masks -- and banned the safety gear from his office -- even as the southern US state has hit record daily coronavirus death tolls.
Sheriff Billy Woods, of central Florida's Marion County, emailed deputies Tuesday to tell them of the new mask prohibition, according to local paper the Ocala Star Banner, citing the message.
"My order will stand as is when you are on-duty/working as my employee and representing my Office – masks will not be worn," the email read.
The sheriff allowed for certain exceptions, including for officers who work in prisons, schools, hospitals or with people suspected of being infected with the virus.
Woods added that his order was due to "the current events when it comes to the sentiment and/or hatred toward law enforcement in our country today."
Woods seemed to be referring to protests against racism and police violence that swept across the country during the spring and early summer.
He also said that visitors to the sheriff's office would not be allowed to wear masks for the same reason: "for identification purposes of any individual walking into a lobby."
Mask-wearing is not compulsory in Florida -- only recommended -- but the state is one of the most severe hotspots of the epidemic in the US. The state registered 212 coronavirus deaths on Wednesday after 276 on Tuesday.
In total, 8,765 people have died of COVID-19 in Florida, out of more than 550,901 cases in the state of 21 million.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), like much of the scientific and medical community, have recommended the use of face masks to stop the spread of the new coronavirus.
Woods said in a Facebook post that he and other US law enforcement officials had spoken on the phone to President Donald Trump, who himself did not wear a face mask in public until months into the pandemic.
Several Facebook users commented on Woods's post, deriding the sheriff's message.
"It's one thing not to require mask wearing, but to explicitly ban it? That takes a special kind of stupid," one said.
Americans come from all over the country to retire in sunny Florida, and about a third of the 355,000 residents of Woods's Marion County are older than 65 -- the population most vulnerable to coronavirus.
Woods's office did not respond to AFP's request for comment Wednesday.
On Wednesday, The Daily Beast reported that a pair of Florida men who used a scam "church" to push people to drink bleach as a COVID-19 cure, have been arrested in Colombia.
"The father and son duo, Mark and Joseph Grenon, were arrested in Santa Marta for allegedly selling their 'Miracle Mineral Solution' across Colombia, the United States, and Africa," reported Madeline Charbonneau. "U.S. authorities conducted a raid in July on the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, of which Mark Grenon is the leader, after Mark, Joseph, Jonathan, and Jordan Grenon were accused of selling the same bleach product as a coronavirus cure. The locations of Jonathan and Jordan Grenon remain unknown."
Miracle Mineral Solution, which is a highly toxic bleaching agent, is promoted by the "church" as transcending modern medicine and delivering divine healing directly from God.
"U.S. prosecutors say the church was created as a way of avoiding government regulation to sell their 'Miracle Mineral Solution,' which they have insisted is a cure to diseases including HIV and cancer," continued the report. "Federal authorities have evidence that drinking the solution has sent several to the hospital, and may have killed people."
In July, the Grenons were charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and deliver misbranded drugs by the U.S. Attorney's office for the Southern District of Florida.
More than 2,500 new coronavirus cases were registered in France in 24 hours in the sharpest increase since May, government data showed on Wednesday, as officials said indicators were "clearly worsening".
Of 600,000 tests over the past week, more than 11,600 were positive, the health ministry's DGS public health division said.
At 2.2 percent, the weekly rate of positives was up from 1.6 percent the week before, confirming "increased viral circulation", it added.
"Indicators used for tracking the epidemic on French territory have clearly worsened in recent days," the DGS said.
With August traditionally a month when many French people take weeks of summer holiday, "it's imperative that we keep up our efforts to avoid the epidemic picking up again, individually and collectively, everywhere and at all times", the DGS said.
Health officials have identified 18 new virus clusters in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 896 nationwide – although the number of patients in intensive care dropped slightly to 379, a level relatively steady since late July.
The government spokesman Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday that France will gradually ramp up police checks to ensure people wear face masks where it is mandatory and respect social distancing amidst a new surge of Covid-19 infections. "We're at a tipping point [...] We're going to mobilize police forces to make checks," Attal said.
This came after the new Prime Minister Jean Castex warned on Tuesday that Covid-19 could get out of hand if people do not take precautions: "If we don't act collectively, we expose ourselves to the heightened risk that the rebound in the epidemic becomes hard to control," he said during a visit to an intensive care ward in southern France.
On Monday, face masks became mandatory in Paris tourist hotspots as authorities try to curb the number of new infections. The order covers busy outdoor areas in the French capital including the banks of the River Seine and the iconic Montmartre area in Paris’s far north – although other renowned tourist hotspots such as the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Élyseés were not listed. Anybody aged 11 faces a €135 ($159) fine if caught without a mask where one is required.
The latest uptick in Covid-19 cases has been most marked in Paris but some other cities including Nice, Toulouse, Biarritz, Marseille and Lille have already ordered people to wear masks in busy outdoor areas. Several coastal towns popular with tourists – including Le Touquet in the Calais region, Saint-Malo on Brittany’s northern coast, and La Rochelle on the Atlantic coast – have done the same.
Almost 30,400 people have died of coronavirus in France since the epidemic began, the third-heaviest toll in Europe after Britain and Italy.
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones says his team expects to welcome fans to games this season despite the coronavirus pandemic and health rules allowing only 50 percent capacity for sports events.
"I'm confident that we have a very educated situation and that our fans can come and have a safe experience at our stadium, along with, of course, our players having the safety they're required on the football field," Jones said Wednesday.
The massive AT&T Stadium, a $1.3 billion venue with 80,000 seats and space for 105,000 with standing room, has suites and other areas for groups plus plenty of room for social distancing, Jones said.
"I don't have an expectation," Jones said when asked about a specific number of spectators.
"You're dealing with a little bit of a moving target and I'm not trying to diminish the moving target aspect of it, but we're very unique in we have the suite capacities we have out there that give us some extra control. We also have a stadium that has three million square feet in it."
Jones is confident the NFL can play a full season, no matter how many spectators are able to attend, and says an NFL campaign is important to the United States.
"Our country really does place football, whether it's misplaced or not, at a very high level," Jones said. "I think it's important in the country.
"The NFL can be an... inspirational part of how we address COVID, not only the remainder of this year but as we go into '21.
"It's easy for me to justify (the costs) for the long-term of interest in football... and what it can bring to the country."
The Cowboys will follow Texas state health and safety protocols on crowds, Jones said, and those rules now allow 50 percent capacity, still a maximum of 40,000 people for the stadium nicknamed 'Jerry World.'
"We'll adhere to all protocols and we will adapt to the uniqueness of our stadium and that's within the protocol," Jones said.
"We have a real unique situation and I think that we're going to be able to really have a great experience."
Jones said the Cowboys' safety precautions "won't be unfamiliar to a lot of people" but adds, "We will have our challenges."
Several NFL teams, including the Cowboys' arch-rivals Washington, have said they plan to play without fans in their stadiums this season, with some saying they would trim seating capacity to 25 percent or less of usual seating to make social distancing possible.
President Donald Trump is reportedly furious at one of his allies for taking his advice.
According to Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman, the president is angry that he can't hold any of his trademark campaign rallies in Florida amid its weeks-long surge in COVID-19 cases.
What's more, Sherman's sources say Trump is putting the blame for this predicament at the feet of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been eager to follow the president's commands to reopen state economies even as the country records more than 50,000 infections and 1,000 new deaths from the novel coronavirus every day.
"He thinks Ron has made it a lot worse," one Republican who spoke with Trump said.
Trump was forced to cancel his planned RNC acceptance speech in Jacksonville after public health officials told him there was no way to safely hold a mass gathering in the city without risking mass COVID-19 infection.
Nonetheless, one aide tells Sherman that "rallies are his jam" and that "Trump won’t be happy until he is doing multiple rallies a day."
A 17-year-old hostess at a Louisiana Chili's restaurant was attacked by a group of more than 11 women when she asked them to abide by social distancing guidelines, WLBT reports.
"I couldn’t believe, like over two for 25s, and three for 10s, I got attacked," Kelsy Wallace said. "My general manager and my other managers tell us we cannot sit a table bigger than six because of the corona[virus]."
That's exactly the rule Wallace tried to enforce when the women requested to sit together at one table. When she brought her manager, the situation escalated and Wallace exchanged words with the women.
"But then one girl come and she just hit me; we just started fighting. And all everybody who they was with just started hitting me, and the lady who pushed me first, she takes the wet floor sign, cocks back, and hits me with it in my eye," said Wallace.
When police arrived in the scene, the group of women had already left.
Wallace received stitches above her eye and had some of her hair pulled from her scalp during the confrontation.
Ultimately, Wallace says, she was just doing her job.
"I was just trying to follow the rules and make sure that I wasn’t going to get in trouble," she said. "Like this is just overwhelming. I just cannot believe that this happened to me of all people."
