US is ‘still knee deep in first wave’ of coronavirus, warns Fauci – live

Anthony Fauci, the top public health expert on the White House coronavirus task force, has not only warned that the US is still “knee deep” in the first wave of the coronavirus outbreak, but said it is because “we never came down to baseline [ie drove infections down] and now are surging back up.”

He said young people need to listen to public health warnings that they are not “invulnerable to serious consequences” of the virus. Even healthy people in their 20s and 30s could end up sick for a long time and, more dangerously, sicken those who are more vulnerable.

“They are propagating the outbreak, Fauci said in an interview via social media with his departmental boss, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins.

He finished on a galvanizing note.

“We have already suffered through a lot of pain, a lot of economic and personal pain and inconvenience.”

But “science will get us through this,” he said. “Hang in there, it will end.”

It’s hard to know how Fauci keeps calm and carries on when he is so frequently undermined by his inexpert, willfully misleading bosses Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

Whether Fauci privately screams “I told you so” into a cushion of an evening and shadow boxes to psych himself up in the morning to tackle another day of trying to stem the tide of information from the rest of the White House is anyone’s guess.

Fauci told US states and cities not to reopen for business until they had had two weeks of declining new cases of coronavirus and had greatly expanded testing for the virus as well as ensuring there was enough hospital capacity and medical supplies to meet local needs.

He was ignored by many governors of states that are now hastily reversing some of their reopenings that they steamrollered through in haste without meeting any of Fauci’s guidelines.

And now, as Fauci pointed out last night, the US is setting records on Covid, such as a world high of new cases in a day, last week when the US confirmed more than 55,000 new infections on Thursday, and states such as Florida, Arizona and Texas – among the loudest flouters of warnings to be cautious – are seeing alarming rates of infection and the hospitalization of serious cases.

This despite Vice President Mike Pence, head of the White House coronavirus task force, hailing “truly remarkable progress” on the pandemic – when the scientists keep telling us it is nowhere near under control in the US.

And Donald Trump repeatedly saying versions of “it will disappear” and it’s mostly harmless, which are 100% incorrect facts.

Like Donald Trump and Britain’s prime minister Boris Johnson (who ended up in intensive care with Covid-19), Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has also infamously scoffed at the pandemic as it began ripping through his country.

Well, Bolsonaro just announced he tested positive for coronavirus.

My colleague Tom Phillips, reporting from Rio, notes that Bolsonaro, 65, has repeatedly trivialized the pandemic and flouted social distancing, even as Brazil became the second-worst-hit country after the United States, with more than 65,000 deaths and 1.6m confirmed cases.

The US has seen 130,430 deaths so far and 2.9m cases, according to Johns Hopkins University figures.

The UK has suffered 44,321 deaths and has 287,000 cases.

Here’s the amazing Johns Hopkins tracker.

Mary Trump writes of “displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity” as part of her uncle Donald’s personality traits, stemming from neglect by his parents – his mother because of health problems and his father because of being a “high functioning sociopath”.

The blog is going to pivot away from this story for a bit and capture some of the other US politics-related news, because my colleague Martin Pengelly will keep readers thoroughly updated via his account of Mary Trump’s new tell-all family book.

It’s not officially due out until later this month, and the family has tried unsuccessfully to block it, but we’ve seen it already….read on:

It’s worth noting that Mary Trump has turned the psychologist’s spotlight on Donald Trump as a relative, while those who work as professional analysts traditionally avoid psychiatric or psychological public comment/analysis on the mental health of the President of the United States.

Mary Trump’s own father, Fred Jr, died when she was 16. Fred Jr had an alcohol dependency and died of an alcohol-related illness in 1981.

This has often been cited as a reason Donald Trump doesn’t drink alcohol.

Mary Trump’s depiction of Fred Trump, father to brothers Fred Jr (aka Freddy), Robert (who went to court to block the book, but has evidently failed), and Donald (Potus) describes a brutal man who forged sons who were psychologically battered and became inveterate liars in a cracked family.

Trump, a doctor of clinical psychology, writes that her father, Freddy, lied as a means of survival in the face of relentless bullying by Fred Sr, while for Donald Trump “lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was”.

The tell-all book due out shortly from Mary Trump, the niece of the president, tells of a family divided by trauma.

The Trump family failed to block the book after court efforts failed to stop publisher Simon & Schuster printing and distributing it, even though a restraining order was ongoing against Mary Trump herself, the daughter of Donald Trump’s late oldest brother.

Mary Trump describes in her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man that Donald Trump effectively suffered “child abuse” from his bullying father, writing that the patriarch “destroyed” his son by damaging his “ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion”.

The behavior caused the young Donald to forever be in need of his father, Fred’s, approval, which all too rarely came, and shaped the former real estate tycoon and now president’s craven need for approval by others, whether relatives, partners, colleagues or world leaders.

The Guardian has obtained a copy of the book and will publish details this morning.

In response to the news that New York state has sanctioned Deutsche Bank, the bank put out a statement by a spokesperson.

We acknowledge our error in onboarding Epstein in 2013 and the weakness in our processes, and have learnt from our mistakes and shortcomings. Immediately following Epstein’s arrest, we contacted law enforcement and offered our full assistance with their investigation.

It goes on to mention Danske Estonia and FBME.

The Department of Financial Services factual findings on Danske Estonia and FBME, like our own internal investigation, identified various deficiencies in our oversight and monitoring of the banks that used our clearing services. There was no intentional effort by anyone within the bank to facilitate unlawful activity…while the settlement reflects our upmost [sic] cooperation and transparent engagement with our regulator, it also shows how important it is to continue investing in our controls and enhancing our anti-financial crime capabilities.

In the settlement agreement and $150m penalty for Deutsche announced this morning by New York, financial services superintendent Linda Lacewell added that suspicious financial actions by Epsetin “should have prompted additional scrutiny in light of Mr. Epstein’s history, including:

• payments to individuals who were publicly alleged to have been Mr. Epstein’s co-conspirators in sexually abusing young women;
• settlement payments totaling over $7 million, as well as dozens of payments to law firms totaling over $6 million for what appear to have been the legal expenses of Mr. Epstein and his co-conspirators;
• payments to Russian models, payments for women’s school tuition, hotel and rent expenses, and (consistent with public allegations of prior wrongdoing) payments directly to numerous women with Eastern European surnames; and
• periodic suspicious cash withdrawals — in total, more than $800,000 over approximately four years.

This substantive failure was compounded by a series of procedural failures, mistakes, and sloppiness in how the Bank managed and oversaw the Epstein accounts.”

The superintendent of financial services in New York state’s Department of Financial Services, Linda Lacewell, announced this morning that Deutsche Bank (Deutsche Bank AG, its New York branch, and Deutsche Bank Trust Company America – collectively “Deutsche Bank”), per press statement, has agreed to pay $150m in penalties for “significant compliance failures in connection with the Bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein”, the late, disgraced sex offender, as well as correspondent banking relationships with Danske Bank Estonia and FBME Bank.

This agreement marks the first enforcement action by a regulator against a financial institution for dealings with Epstein, the department announced.

Investigations into Epstein were clearly about a lot more than trafficking girls, and details are likely to emerge further as the summer goes on. Everyone is waiting to see what Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend and confidant, will tell investigators now that she is in custody in New York, having been arrested by the FBI in New Hampshire last weekend.

Lacewell’s statement continued:

Banks are the first line of defense with respect to preventing the facilitation of crime through the financial system, and it is fundamental that banks tailor the monitoring of their customers’ activity based upon the types of risk that are posed by a particular customer.In each of the cases that are being resolved today, Deutsche Bank failed to adequately monitor the activity of customers that the Bank itself deemed to be high risk.

In the case of Jeffrey Epstein in particular, despite knowing Mr Epstein’s terrible criminal history, the Bank inexcusably failed to detect or prevent millions of dollars of suspicious transactions.”

With respect to the case of Jeffrey Epstein, the Bank failed to properly monitor account activity conducted on behalf of the registered sex offender despite ample information that was publicly available concerning the circumstances surrounding Mr. Epstein’s earlier criminal misconduct. The result was that the Bank processed hundreds of transactions totaling millions of dollars that, at the very least, should have prompted additional scrutiny in light of Mr. Epstein’s history.”

Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms was also asked on ABC this morning about a rise in gun violence on the streets of parts of Atlanta over the weekend as well as other cities in the US, especially Chicago and, notably, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

Several very young children have been killed or wounded by stray bullets as shooting broke out in some troubled urban areas, including an eight-year-old girl, Secoriea Taylor, who died in Atlanta while sitting in the car with her mother.

“It’s just this perfect storm of distress in America,” Lance Bottoms said.

She continued:

People are obviously anxious and angry about the coronavirus pandemic, loved ones are dying, people are losing their jobs, I think there is a lot of frustration, a lot of angst and I think that the rhetoric that comes out of the White House does not help at all.

It doesn’t give people much hope and it’s all converging together and we are seeing it happen and spill out onto the streets of Atlanta and across America.

On top of that, the cases that we have all witnessed of police brutality – it has all come together in a violent way.

Atlanta mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is not sure if her coronavirus symptoms are “on the way up or on the way down” after she announced yesterday that she tested positive for Covid-19.

She said some very interesting things in the interview, so stand by for subsequent posts.

But on coronavirus, she, her husband and one of their three children have tested positive. The other two children are getting tested today.

Lance Bottoms asserted that she could continue doing the job of running Atlanta at the moment.

“I feel okay, George,” she told ABC’s Good Morning America anchor George Stephanopoulos.

She said she has “the same headache that I’ve had during stressful times and allergy season.”

She was alerted to her husband’s sickness by the fact that he “slept from Thursday to yesterday” but is now feeling better.

Of her own infection she said: “I hope it won’t get any worse, I have a ‘low positive’ [diagnosis] so it’s either on the way up or the way down.”

She will now be “quarantining and the other things they recommend you do.”

“I don’t know what the president means by that” – health expert.

Donald Trump has tweeted this about the coronavirus this morning, mentioning a piece from the right-leaning Washington Times.

Moments later, Ashish Jha, professor of global health at the Harvard school of public health and Dean of the Brown University school of public health, was on CNN refuting that.

“I do not know what the president means by that, we do not have the lowest mortality rate,” he said.

Measuring the percentage of people who die per infected person, he said, his response to the president’s tweet was a simple “No”.

Jha also pointed out that the US has the highest confirmed death toll in the world from coronavirus, at 130,310 this morning, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. The number of confirmed cases is on the brink of three million, also an unwanted world record.

The number of daily deaths in the US has been falling lately, which is obviously good news. Many more younger people are becoming infected in the new surges of coronavirus now hitting at least 40 out of 50 states, especially across the south and west, and they are less likely to die.

But other factors to take into account are that the death rate lags the infection rate and we are not yet seeing the infection statistics from those who may have been sickened over the July Fourth holiday weekend, when many stayed home but many others were seen out and about in crowded situations without social distancing or masks.

The US’s top public health expert, Anthony Fauci, the top federal scientist on the White House coronavirus task force, has warned that the US situation in the pandemic is “really not good” as new cases surge in the vast majority of states, especially the south and west.

“We are still knee deep in the first wave” of the Covid-19 outbreak, he has warned.

He pointed out in an interview via social media last night with National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins that the US has “record breaking” numbers, absolutely not the records the US wants to be breaking or show that the nation is “leading” the world in its handling of the virus, as White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany asserted yesterday.

According to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins University, which the Guardian relies on most of all, the US has lost 130,310 people to Covid-19 and is just about to cross the threshold of three million cases, with 2.98m current cases as of this morning.

More than one person on social media has pointed out that the two lead stories on today’s Miami Herald front page neatly encapsulate the US approach to the coronavirus. On the one hand, ordering schools to re-open. On the other, bars and restaurants that had been re-opened to get the Florida economy going, having to close again because of the latest Covid-19 surge.

With Donald Trump and Joe Biden having long ago sewn-up their nominations for the presidential election, you could be forgiven for finding the rest of the primary season a little lacklustre.

That may not be the case in New Jersey today, however, where there should be a heated five-way fight in the Democratic primary to see who will face Rep. Jeff Van Drew in the state’s 2nd District in November.

You may recall that before Christmas, Van Drew switched from being a Democratic congressman to representing the Republicans, after disagreeing with the party hierarchy over the impeachment of Trump.

Julia Manchester at The Hill has run the rule over the challengers. Read it here: The Hill – Democrats fight it out to challenge top target Van Drew

Pete Buttigieg has just tweeted out a link to the video of the alleged assault on Vauhxx Booker at the weekend, which authorities are currently investigating.

Buttigieg describes the incident as a “violent show of racism” that is “absolutely sickening”.

Booker, a local civil rights activist and member of the Monroe County Human Rights Commission, posted the video on Facebook after the men assaulted him and pinned him to a tree at Lake Monroe, south of Booker’s hometown of Bloomington.

Local media have reported that at least two protesters were struck by a vehicle last night towards the end of a protest in Bloomington demanding arrests over the attack on Booker.

Graphic video clips posted on social media appear to show a red car driving at speed with at least one person being carried on the hood.

Geoff Stewart, one of the people apparently struck, told local news outlet RTV6 what happened:

A woman driving the vehicle came up to the stop and had started revving her engine toward us and we tried to stop her and let her know that the crowd is clearing up just wait a second. But, she and her passenger both wanted to go right away so they started to push, they pushed into the woman that was with me and when she pushed again both of us went on the vehicle.

My colleague Joanna Walters, who will be taking over from me here later on today, has been looking at a holiday weekend of gun violence in the US, and talking to people about what can be done. Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms made an impassioned plea for the violence to stop after an eight year old girl was shot and killed in her city over the weekend.

The Rev Gregory Livingston, a pastor and civil rights leader who moved to New York last summer after many years running an anti-violence community organization in his native Chicago, spoke of the midwest city “going through absolute madness”.

“Chicago is, woefully, a tale of two cities and across the country it’s a tale of two Americas. Chicago is a very segregated city and that legacy is part of what’s fueling this horrific violence,” Livingston told the Guardian

Researchers have also suggested there might be a potential link between the rise in violence and a surge in gun-buying during the coronavirus pandemic. 2.1 million more guns than usual were sold between March and May this year.

Read it here: Gun violence kills 160 as holiday weekend exposes tale of ‘two Americas’

Here’s one from the “Well, this is awkward” files…Fox News has apologised after cropping Donald Trump out of a photo in which he appeared with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

In a statement Fox News said: “On Sunday, 5 July, a report on Ghislaine Maxwell during Fox News Channel’s America’s News HQ mistakenly eliminated President Donald Trump from a photo alongside then Melania Knauss, Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell. We regret the error.”

There’s more here: Fox News apologises for cropping Trump out of Epstein and Maxwell photo