Coronavirus:
Trump hurls insults as 21 cases confirmed on cruise ship
President
attacks CNN and Democrats at CDC event
Universities
cancel classes in Washington state
Sam Levin
and agencies
@SamTLevin
Email
Sat 7 Mar
2020 03.00 GMTFirst published on Fri 6 Mar 2020 16.44 GMT
Donald
Trump used a freewheeling press conference on Friday, intended to provide
updates on the coronavirus, as an opportunity to attack Democrats, praise his
own intelligence, lash out at CNN and spread false and misleading information
about the status of the outbreak, as a slew of new cases were confirmed aboard
a cruise ship off the California coast.
Speaking at
the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) main campus in Atlanta, Georgia, while
wearing his red “Keep America Great” re-election campaign hat, the president
went on a rant criticizing Washington state’s governor, Jay Inslee, as a
“snake” and saying he disagreed with his vice-president’s complimentary remarks
toward the Democrat. Inslee, who ran for president last year, is overseeing the
response to the most serious outbreak in the US.
In a moment
that some commentators have called one of the most “disturbing” and
“frightening” remarks of Trump’s response to the public health crisis, the
president also said he would prefer that cruise ship passengers exposed to the
virus be left aboard so that they don’t add to the number of total infections in
the US.
“I like the numbers being where they are,”
said Trump, who appeared to be explicitly acknowledging his political concerns
about the outbreak: “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one
ship that wasn’t our fault.”
The
president further implied that the coronavirus test was available to anyone who
needed it, even though his own administration has acknowledged that there is
currently a shortage among US health care providers.
Trump’s
remarks came as the vice-president, Mike Pence, announced that 21 people on a
cruise ship being held off San Francisco had tested positive for coronavirus.
He also urged older Americans to “use caution” in planning any cruise ship
vacation.
Speaking at
the White House, Pence said the government was planning to bring the Grand
Princess cruise ship into a “non-commercial port” where all the passengers and
crew would be tested. They would be quarantined and treated as needed.
There are more
than 3,500 people on the ship, counting passengers and crew. Pence said 19 of
those who tested positive were crew members and two were passengers.
The US
death toll from the coronavirus has climbed to 14, according to Johns Hopkins’
tracker, with 329 cases scattered across the country. All but one of the deaths
were in Washington state.
Inslee
later responded on Twitter to the president’s personal insults and attack,
saying: “My single focus is and will continue to be the health and well-being
of Washingtonians. It’s important for leaders to speak with one voice. I just
wish the president and vice president could get on the same page.”
In
California, a military helicopter crew lowered test kits onto the 951ft
(290-meter) Grand Princess by rope and later retrieved them for analysis at a
lab as the vessel lay at sea off the coast, under orders to keep its distance
from shore.
Elsewhere
in the US, the University of Washington, which has about 50,000 students, said
on Friday that it would cancel in-person classes and conduct courses and exams
remotely while the Seattle area deals with a coronavirus epidemic that has put
the region at the center of the outbreak in the US.
Donald
Trump listens as the CDC director, Dr Robert Redfield, speaks on Friday.
Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images
In an email
to staff the university’s president, Ana Mari Cauce, said campuses would remain
open for other services, such as medical services, dining, residence halls, and
recreation and athletics events.
But in the
absence of students, crews of workers would deep-clean classrooms, libraries
and other public spaces. “Our goal is to make sure that students’ academic work
is fairly recognized and that any disruption does not present a disadvantage to
their future academic progress,” Cauce said.
Seattle
University, which has about 7,300 students, and Seattle Pacific University,
which has about 3,500 students, also announced Friday that they would not be
holding in-person classes through the end of winter quarter, 20 March. Both
schools said they were not aware of any confirmed cases of coronavirus on their
campuses.
At the
center of the Seattle-area outbreak was a suburban nursing home, now under
federal investigation. Families of nursing home residents voiced anger, having
received conflicting information about the condition of their loved ones.
One woman
was told her mother had died, then got a call from a staffer who said her
mother was doing well, only to find out she had, in fact, died, said Kevin
Connolly, whose father-in-law is also a facility resident.
“This is
the level of incompetence we’re dealing with,” Connolly said in front of the
Life Care Center in Kirkland.
The
coronavirus has infected aboutd 100,000 people worldwide and killed more than
3,400, the vast majority of them in China. Most cases have been mild, and more
than half of those infected have recovered.
Donald
Trump signed an $8.3bn measure to help tackle the outbreak. It provides federal
public health agencies with money for tests and for potential vaccines and
treatments and helps state and local governments prepare for the threat and
respond to it.
Some major
businesses in the Seattle area, where researchers say the virus may have
circulated undetected for weeks, have shut down some operations or urged
employees to work from home. That includes Microsoft and Amazon, the two tech
giants that together employ more than 100,000 people in the region.
King county
is buying a motel for $4m to house patients and hopes to have the first of them
in place within days at the 84-room Econo Lodge in Kent, about 20 miles (32 km)
from Seattle. The rooms’ doors open to the outside rather than to a central
hallway, reducing the likelihood of contact between patients.
The plan
was met with resistance from local leaders, including Kent’s police chief,
Rafael Padilla, who called it “ill-advised and dangerous” and warned: “At any
point a patient can simply walk into our community and spread the virus.”
New York’s
mayor implored the federal government to send more test kits to his state. Gap
closed its New York office and asked employees to work from home until further
notice after learning that an employee had the virus.
In Rhode
Island, about 200 people were quarantined because of their connections to a
school trip to Italy that has so far resulted in three cases. Amid four cases
in Florida, the state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, said the risks remained low for
most people planning trips to the state for spring break or baseball’s spring
training.
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