Oklahoma officials ask Trump for plan to keep rally safe amid pandemic

Officials with the Oklahoma arena where Donald Trump plans to hold his first in-person rally since the Covid-19 pandemic hit the US have asked the president’s campaign for a written plan to keep attendees safe.

The 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa will host the rally on Saturday night and mark Trump’s return to active campaigning in the 2020 election. But the multi-hour, indoor rally comes just as Covid-19 cases are rising in Tulsa, in what could be the state’s first large outbreak.

More than 9,300 people in Oklahoma have tested positive for the coronavirus since March, nearly 2,000 of whom are in Tulsa, according to a tracker from Johns Hopkins University. At least 366 people have succumbed to the disease in Oklahoma, including 65 people in Tulsa.

The BOK Center said in a statement it had asked the campaign for “a written plan detailing the steps the event will institute for health and safety, including those related to social distancing”.

The center said it made the request in light of “recent reports of increases in coronavirus cases” from the Tulsa Health Department, and “the state of Oklahoma’s encouragement for event organizers to follow CDC guidelines”.

“I wish we could postpone this to a time when the virus isn’t as large a concern as it is today,” Tulsa City-County health department director Bruce Dart told Tulsa World last week. “It’s an honor for Tulsa to have a sitting president want to come and visit our community, but not during a pandemic.”

The Trump campaign said more than one million people have requested tickets for the event, although the campaign also has a history of inflating rally attendance. But some people have been camping out on the streets of Tulsa since at least Wednesday to attend the controversial gathering.

The campaign has already committed to checking every attendees’ temperature, and providing masks and hand sanitizer as they enter the building. The event center has installed plexiglass between food vendors and customers, and plans to have workers disinfect surfaces throughout the event. All attendees are also being asked to sign liability waivers.

The center’s statement comes after a lawsuit filed by local attorneys sought to require all attendees to wear masks, which they lost in local courts. Masks have become a subject of partisan rancor, with Trump supporters publicly eschewing them and Republican governors undermining health officials’ calls for “universal” masking.

In just one recent instance in Nebraska, the Republican governor, Pete Ricketts told local courthouses they could not require masks. If they did, towns could be cut out of $100m in federal Covid-19 response aid.

America’s top infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci, said he would not attend an in-person rally, like Tulsa, at this point in the pandemic.

“Personally, I would not,” he told the Daily Beast. In terms of spreading Covid-19, Fauci said this week, “Outside is better than inside, no crowd is better than crowd… Crowd is better than big crowd.”

Read the original article at The Guardian