Coronavirus US live: Fauci to testify on ‘needless’ danger of reopening early as Trump tweets in anger

More on Dr Anthony Fauci’s email to the New York Times and the prospects for the top public health expert’s Senate testimony today.

“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate … committee,” Fauci wrote, “is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely. If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to ‘Open America Again’, then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”

As Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it in her report, “It is a message starkly at odds with the things-are-looking-up argument that President Trump has been trying to put out: that states are ready to reopen and the pandemic is under control.

Remember a few weeks ago, when Fauci confirmed reporting about a White House ignoring warnings about Covid-19 and we all thought the 79-year-old, just about the most trusted man in America having served Democrats and Republicans since 1984, was about to be fired?

I do, just about, and he wasn’t fired then. But as we know, Donald Trump is not a man who likes to be upstaged and to see others’ profiles grow larger than his, let alone see them played on Saturday Night Live by Brad Pitt while the president gets eviscerated by Alec Baldwin, again.

And though Fauci will testify remotely today, due to those White House coronavirus cases, he will be on a very big stage indeed.

Dr Stephen Hahn of the Food and Drug Administration and Dr Robert Redfield of the Centers for Disease Control and Protection will also testify remotely at the hearing, which will be chaired remotely by Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican who had a staffer test positive and who made headlines on Sunday by questioning the administration’s ambitious timeline for a vaccine.

Here’s one Republican response to Fauci. It’s from Andy Biggs, a congressman from Arizona, a state which is pressing on with reopening despite, according to an NYT database, cases continuing to rise:

Dr Fauci has continually used his bully pulpit to bring public criticism on governors who are seeking to open up their states. The Fauci-[Dr Deborah] Birx team have replaced faith w/ fear & hope w/ despair. The remedy is to open up our society & our economy. Trust & respect our freedom.

…and welcome to another day of coronavirus coverage in the US. The politics of it in a minute – the president is up and tweeting – but first as ever the figures from Johns Hopkins University:

• US cases: 1,347,765
• US deaths: 80,679
• New York cases: 337,055
• New York deaths: 26,988

I’ve singled out New York as the hardest-hit state but it is getting less hard hit, as Governor Andrew Cuomo said yesterday, outlining reopening plans for some regions, as Lauren Gambino reports here.

There’s news this morning too. As states try to reopen their economies, egged on by the administration, Dr Anthony Fauci, the public health expert who is in isolation after an outbreak of cases at the White House, will testify before the Senate today, remotely of course and to senators in masks, sitting six feet apart.

Fauci has told the New York Times: “The major message that I wish to convey … is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely. If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines … then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.””

Trump’s not going to like that, but it’s always nice to single out some non-Trump work before I get to him, so here’s Tom McCarthy on the race for a vaccine… and how Trump’s “America First” approach is slowing the global effort.

Try again: Richard Luscombe on the threat to Florida’s greyhounds. And Sam Levin from Los Angeles on a shocking case of death in the US immigration system:

And so to Trump.

He’s tweeting this morning on familiar subjects: “Obamagate” (here’s David Smith’s explainer), how Bill Maher “sucks” and how NBC host Chuck Todd “fails again”, and something about strong borders and “182 miles of Border Wall already built”. (That’s the wall that he said Mexico would pay for and, to put it very simply, isn’t being built along the whole border, which runs nearly 2,000 miles.)

Two key tweets for now: responding to conservative columnist John Solomon, he of the Ukraine affair, noting that Nancy Pelosi would be third in line to the presidency if Trump and Pence fell to Covid-19 – “Then we must be very careful. Crazy Nancy would be a total disaster, and the USA will never be a Communist Country!” – and calling reporters to whom Trump responded in a Rose Garden presser by walking out “Fake Journalists!”

Those were the salient lines of a chaotic Monday in Washington: after a rash of cases and with top experts isolated, the White House has instituted new rules including regarding the wearing of masks, but that does not apply to Trump.

And the press conference – a new low in Trump’s use of such occasions to bully, browbeat, distort or break the truth and attract accusations of racism, or if you support him, another successful battle with a perfidious foe.

It’s an election year, and some reports have Trump worried about his polling and considering campaign shakeups, so it will only get hotter from here.