Vice President Mike Pence is wrongly asserting that the spread of coronavirus in Tulsa, Oklahoma, isn’t something to worry about, days before President Donald Trump’s first campaign rally since March is set to take place there.
Pence believes that such fears are misplaced because, according to him, the state where the rally is going to happen has seen cases go down.
“The number of cases in Oklahoma has declined precipitously and we feel very confident going forward with the rally this coming weekend,” Pence recently said.
However, that statement from the vice president is demonstratively false: cases are going up, not down, in both Oklahoma and in Tulsa itself, making it more likely that Trump’s campaign rally will boost the spread of the coronavirus.
According to numbers obtained earlier on Tuesday afternoon from The New York Times’s coronavirus tracking website, the seven-day average of new cases being observed across the state currently sits at 173.0 new cases per day. The previous seven-day average was 90.4 new cases per day.
The seven-day average in Tulsa County, where the campaign rally will take place on Saturday, is currently at 56.0 new cases per day. Two weeks ago, that average was at just 18.4 new cases per day — a 304 percent increase in numbers during that time.
The increase in new cases is evident in a visual way as well, as shown by a tweet from CNN’s Daniel Dale, demonstrating that the number of cases isn’t declining, but increasing across the state.
Pence says Oklahoma has flattened the curve and that the number of cases in the state has "declined precipitously." https://t.co/ewI8rrLwsf pic.twitter.com/UfFjUywC0x
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) June 15, 2020
Many in Tulsa do not want the president to make his first campaign stop in their city, with The Tulsa World editorial board opining on Monday against doing so. Tulsa is “still dealing with the challenges created by a pandemic,” the paper noted.
Bruce Dart, the director of Tulsa’s City-County Health Department, also weighed in, telling The Tulsa World in a separate news article he felt that Trump should reconsider, too.
“I think it’s an honor for Tulsa to have a sitting president want to come and visit our community, but not during a pandemic,” Dart explained.
Trump frequently denounced warnings about COVID-19 in the run-up to the pandemic, particularly in late February and early March, when he assured Americans it was nothing to worry over. After he relented and issued social distancing guidelines for states to employ, he soon demanded that the nation “reopen,” perhaps doing so in order to help his reelection chances for this year’s presidential race.
Trump’s recent statements on the virus’s spread don’t inspire much confidence in his understanding of properly containing the spread of the disease, either. “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” the president suggested on Monday.
As of Tuesday, more than 118,000 Americans have died of coronavirus, with nearly 2.2 million having contracted the disease since March 1.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.