COVID-19 pandemic in the United States

"It’s fading away, it’s going to fade away."

"We have got the greatest testing program anywhere in the world."

"We’ve done too good a job."

"You know testing is a double-edged sword. ... Here’s the bad part. When you test to that extent, you are going to find more people, find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down please.’"

"To one extent or another, the volume of new cases coming in is a reflection of a great success in expanding testing across the country."

"If his people who are called by His name will humble themselves and pray, He will do as He has done for generations and heal His people and He will heal this land, I leave here today confident that God is at work. Even though it may not seem that way God is working. Even when things don’t seem like they’re going the way we expected, they’re going the way God expected."

"I think we’re gonna be very good with the coronavirus. I think that at some point that’s going to, sort of, just disappear—I hope."

"We got hit by the virus that came from China. We’ve made a lot of progress. Our strategy is moving along well."

"We’ve learned how to put out the flame."

"Now we have tested almost 40m people. By so doing, we show cases, 99% of which are totally harmless."

"As the pandemic surges back, Trump and his lackeys have:"

"So let me get this straight: Extending additional unemployment benefits to out-of-work Americans during a pandemic will make them lazy and lead to socialism, but trillions in bailouts to Wall St. bankers and corporate execs is good for the economy?"

"I don't regret that. At that time, there was a paucity of equipment that our health care providers needed -- who put themselves daily in harm's way of taking care of people who are ill. We did not want to divert masks and PPE away from them, to be used by the people."

"We’re very much going to put pressure on governors and everybody else to open the schools."

"WASHINGTON — Inside the sprawling American Embassy compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a coronavirus outbreak was spreading. Dozens of embassy employees became sick last month, and more than 20 others were quarantined after a birthday barbecue became a potential vector for the spread of the disease. A Sudanese driver for the top diplomats died. A bleak analysis from within the embassy that circulated in closed channels in Riyadh and Washington late last month likened the coronavirus situation in Saudi Arabia to that of New York City in March, when an outbreak was set to explode. The assessment said the response from the Saudi government — a close partner of the Trump White House — was insufficient, even as hospitals were getting overwhelmed and health care workers were falling ill. Some in the embassy even took the extraordinary step of conveying information to Congress outside official channels, saying that they did not believe the State Department’s leadership or the American ambassador to the kingdom, John P. Abizaid, were taking the situation seriously enough, and that most American Embassy employees and their families should be evacuated. The State Department took those steps months ago at missions elsewhere in the Middle East, Asia and Russia."

"Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!"

"Deaths in the U.S. are way down."

"For the 1/100th time, the reason we show so many Cases, compared to other countries that haven’t done nearly as well as we have, is that our TESTING is much bigger and better. We have tested 40,000,000 people. If we did 20,000,000 instead, Cases would be half, etc. NOT REPORTED!"

"We have the lowest Mortality Rate in the World."

"Job growth is biggest in history."

"Economy and Jobs are growing MUCH faster than anyone (except me!) expected."

"The elites are not responding rationally to the coronavirus pandemic, the economic devastation and the myriad of other problems facing the United States right now. America's ruling class is doing just what they did in 2008, which is to line their own pockets at the public's expense and to cast the rest of the country — the working poor and the working class — aside as if they were human refuse. That is all very shortsighted, of course, because of the blowback. The ramifications are catastrophic. One would think that America's elites would respond in a smarter way, if even for their own self-preservation. If elected president, Joe Biden certainly isn't going to respond properly."

"The moment that the Chinese scientists and doctors announced that the coronavirus could be transmitted between human beings on Jan. 20, 2020, the socialist governments went into action to monitor ports of entry and to test and trace key parts of the population. They set up task forces and procedures to immediately make sure that the infection would not go out of control amongst their people. They did not wait till the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11. This is in stark contrast to governments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, and other capitalist states, where there has been a hallucinatory attitude towards the Chinese government and the WHO. There is no comparison between the stance of Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and U.S. President Donald Trump: the former had a sober, science-based attitude, while the latter has consistently laughed off the coronavirus as a simple flu as recently as June 24."

"Look, I take responsibility always for everything because it's ultimately my job, too. I have to get everybody in line."

"We've done much better than most. And with the fatality rate at a lower rate than most, it's something that we can talk about."

"It's no secret that submarines with their confined quarters are ideal places for diseases to spread. Yet the U.S. submarine force, which has a little more than 24,000 members, has managed to keep the novel coronavirus at bay with an infection rate of less than 0.5%, according to the force's commander, Vice Adm. Daryl Caudle. In a phone interview this week, Caudle attributed the success to a variety of factors. Those include "a culture of compliance" among submariners, who are trained to run and operate nuclear propulsion plants at sea, a "strong team ethos" of not wanting to let fellow crew members down by bringing COVID-19 on board, and the compliance of local communities such as New London County, where these sailors work and live. While the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt became the worst-case example of how COVID-19 can rapidly course through sailors aboard a ship, submarine crews have not experienced such an outbreak."

"So it sort of is curious. A man works for us, with us, very closely, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx also, very highly thought of -- and yet, they're highly thought of, but nobody likes me? It can only be my personality, that's all."

"You can look at large portions of our country, it's corona-free."

"We're seeing improvements across major metro areas, and most hotspots, you can look at large portions of our country, it's corona-free."

"Young people are almost immune to this disease."

"They are dying. That's true. And you -- it is what it is. But that doesn't mean we aren't doing everything we can. It's under control as much as you can control it. This is a horrible plague that beset us."

"You can take the number of cases and look we're last, meaning we're first."

"Please donate plasma now, you can litterally save lives"

"Q: (Inaudible) if 160,000 people had died on President Obama's watch, do you think you would have called for his resignation?"

"Political, economic and social dysfunction define the American empire. Our staggering inability to contain the pandemic, which now infects over 5 million Americans, and the failure to cope with the economic fallout the pandemic has caused, has exposed the American capitalist model as bankrupt. It has freed the world, dominated by the United States for seven decades, to look at other social and political systems that serve the common good rather than corporate greed. The diminished stature of the United States, even among our European allies, brings with it the hope for new forms of government and new forms of power."

"They found that during the peak of the 1918 influenza outbreak in New York City, a total of 31,589 all-cause deaths (this included death from any cause) occurred among the 5.5 million residents that lived there at the time. The all-cause mortality in the peak of the influenza pandemic in 1918 was 2.8 times higher than during the same months in previous years. In contrast, for the early 2020 COVID-19 outbreak in New York City, they found that 33,465 deaths from all causes occurred among 8.28 million residents between March 11 and May 11. The all-cause mortality in those months of 2020 were 4.15 times higher than those months between 2017 and 2019. That means that in the peak of the 1918 influenza pandemic in NYC about 287 per 100,000 people died a month from any cause in NYC, whereas during the early COVID-19 outbreak, about 202 per 100,000 people died a month in the city. So the all-cause mortality during the spring of 2020 was 70% of the all cause mortality during the fall of 1918. "When we do that, we see that COVID-19 really does have the potential and has already unfortunately caused per capita death rates that were in the same ballpark," Faust told Live Science."

"But there's another way to look at the deaths related to each pandemic: comparing deaths during a pandemic to the baseline that you'd expect during a particular time. There were more "excess deaths" during the 1918 flu than the early COVID-19 outbreak. But in relative terms, the COVID-19 outbreak in the spring actually looks worse, because the numbers quadrupled from pre-pandemic times (from a baseline of around 50 deaths per 100,000 people per month), whereas in the peak of the 1918 flu, the numbers less than tripled (from a baseline of around 100 deaths per 100,000 people per month). "Its a bigger shock to our system, but that's a little bit unfair because we started off at a lower death rate," than there was in 1918, due to advances in hygiene, medicine, public health and safety, Faust said. Really, we don't yet know if the 1918 pandemic or the COVID-19 pandemic is more deadly, he added. Maybe what happened in New York in the spring was a "freak thing," before interventions such as masks and shutdowns took hold; or maybe the numbers will slowly creep up to match the death tolls seen in the 1918 flu until an effective vaccine is found."

"In the absence of any national strategy for tackling the coronavirus pandemic, colleges and universities in the United States are on their own when it comes to deciding whether and how to bring students back for the autumn term, which has already started for some institutions. Many are relying on their own experts, resulting in a wide range of approaches, from telling students to attend online classes from home to bringing everyone back and testing them three times a week. Some are welcoming limited numbers of students with a face mask stamped with the university’s mascot, a bottle of hand sanitizer and plans to test only a fraction of people on campus. It all amounts to a gigantic, unorganized public-health experiment — with millions of students and an untold number of faculty members and staff as participants. Bringing so many university students to crowded campuses is uniquely risky in the United States, which has seen the largest number of deaths to COVID-19 of any country and has active community transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the pandemic. Other large countries with surging infection rates, such as India and Brazil, are not opening up campuses to the same degree. According to the College Crisis Initiative, a research project at Davidson College in North Carolina, more than 1,000 four-year colleges and universities in the United States will bring students back to campus in some form, with 45 operating “fully in person”, another 446 as “primarily in person”, and nearly 600 offering various combinations of online and in-person classes as of 7 August (see ‘Back to school’). But plans change daily, with many universities that boldly planned to hold in-person classes deciding at the last minute to switch to virtual versions."

"University presidents who have pushed for some semblance of normal classes have emphasized students’ eagerness to return, and the risk of “failing to provide the next generation of leaders the education they need and to do the research and scholarship so valuable to our society”, as John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, wrote in an opinion piece for The New York Times in May. On 18 August, Notre Dame announced it would suspend in-person classes for two weeks because of the rapid rise of infections there."

"Universities have justified calling students back to campuses for educational purposes, but some experts say there is a less-exalted motivation: institutions need the money. More than in many other countries, universities in the United States have increasingly come to rely on tuition income and fees, including payments for housing and meals, to stay afloat, according to higher-education researcher Kevin McClure at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Higher-education consultants SimpsonScarborough, based in Alexandria, Virginia, surveyed more than 900 incoming first-year students in July and found that 40% might put off attending university, potentially slashing tuition income. And for universities that opt to hold only virtual classes, revenue from dining halls, housing, gyms, parking and other facilities that charge fees will drop precipitously. University presidents have been projecting massive budget shortfalls: $96 million at Boston University in Massachusetts, $100 million at University of Wisconsin Madison, $120 million at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, $375 million at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Although the US Congress allocated $14.25 billion in emergency spending for universities and colleges earlier this year, that is much too little to fill the financial holes that they face. And so the economic pressure to reopen, retain students, and get bodies into residence halls and cafeterias is intense. “Had universities been provided with resources that would have allowed them to shut down in the fall and operate virtually, I think every single one of them would have done it,” McClure says."

"At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, president Martha Pollack announced that the campus would be reopening because mathematical modelling suggested that there would be fewer COVID-19 cases that way. If the campus were kept closed, many students would still live in shared housing in and around Ithaca, a survey found. These students would drive an outbreak of some 7,200 cases, according to a model created by operations researcher Peter Frazier and his colleagues. That could be mitigated if the students were on campus and being tested regularly. In that scenario, the model predicts just 1,200 cases. Others question Cornell’s rationale. Inglesby says universities should tell students from outside the area to stay at home, rather than tailoring a plan around their desire to show up. “That’s not making decisions in the right order,” he says. Cornell sociologist Kim Weeden pointed out in a tweet that the survey was carried out in late spring, when cases were declining — and it didn’t poll the parents of students. “Whoever is footing the bills may have quite different ideas on the subject,” she wrote. Frazier says that merely urging students, many of whom have already signed leases, to stay at home would be a toothless request. And although fewer students might show up than planned to do so in May, his model still suggests keeping them on campus, where testing can be required, is safest overall. “The conclusion that residential is safer than online is really, really, robust to the number of students returning,” he says."

"In May, participants in a meeting of the Association of Independent Colleges & Universities in Massachusetts teamed up to model COVID-19’s spread on campuses. The resulting analysis suggests that outbreaks can be prevented during an 80-day shortened semester if students are tested every 2 days, even if the tests don’t catch every case. The cost would be about $470 per student. In response, a number of universities, including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, plan to test their residential students multiple times per week. They also plan to isolate students who test positive, and to trace their contacts. Researchers who are advising universities say that models are imperfect, but they remain one of the few scientific tools available to guide reopening decisions. “There is going to be no clinical trial; we have to model this,” says Rochelle Walensky, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and a co-author of the analysis of potential COVID-19 campus spread. She is also a member of the Harvard reopening committee, and says she has spoken to “many university opening committees”."

"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is able to test all its 50,000 students, 2,800 faculty members and 8,200 staff twice a week with its own saliva polymerase-chain-reaction test, which costs just $10 a pop. Students will get a notification on the Safer in Illinois app, and then head to one of 50 kiosks on campus. “You walk up, you swipe your card, you dribble into a tube, you drop it into a bag and you are done — and within 3 hours it is in your phone,” says chemist Martin Burke, who helped design the test. Those who don’t get tested won’t be able to access campus buildings. “This is 2020, not 1918. We don’t want to just revert to the methodologies from back then,” says Burke. “How do we leverage the tremendous power of modern science? We can crush this thing.”"

"At the University of California, Irvine, campus managers will keep an eye on how crowded buildings are, using a system that has been under development for years with a grant from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. As students’ phones and laptops search for Wi-Fi signals in buildings, they generate ‘probe events’ that will be used to estimate how many people are in each area. A dashboard alerts managers to overcrowding, which can then be addressed by putting up signs, moving furniture around or giving students a stern talking-to. In the future, students might also get an alert if they have shared space with a person known to have COVID-19. The system strips away IP addresses and other identifying info, but students who are still unhappy about having their data collected can opt out. Sharad Mehrotra, a computer scientist who leads the project, says it will help the university limit transmission of COVID-19. “When the pandemic started and things were locked down, the responsibility of handling the situation largely resided with the government,” says Mehrotra. “But as things open up, the responsibility shifts to the community. It shifts to individuals, but also to organizations. What roles organizations can play has not been settled yet.”"

"Almost all plans for a physical return to campus include masks, social distancing and bans on social gatherings, potentially removing the core motivation for many students to attend in person. Two of the biggest American football conferences, the Big Ten and Pac-12, announced on 11 August that they won’t play this autumn, in what many see as a sign that most collegiate sports will be postponed until at least next spring. Some researchers say it will be difficult to stop informal gatherings and off-campus parties, no matter how many apps students download or pledges they sign. Many question whether it is realistic to expect young people in the most intensely social phase of their lives to follow rules to the letter. Less than 60% of the students SimpsonScarborough surveyed said they were willing to “avoid social events and parties with more than 10 people”. McClure has strong doubts about the autumn. “Never in my lifetime have I seen the level of compliance that is being expected for this to work.”"

"Traditional migration push factors like insecurity and economic conditions continue to push individuals north to the United States. While we are addressing illegal migration through a network of initiatives, we are concerned that during a pandemic this poses a more specific threat to the migrants, the communities they transit, to U.S. border communities, and to our officers and agents who encounter migrants when they enter the United States. To mitigate this threat we instituted enhanced restrictions at our borders, limited travel to only essential travelers and implemented a Center for Disease Control (CDC) order that protects Americans from COVID-19."

"COVID-19 is the most recent and deadly, in a list of infectious diseases that have threatened the lives of Americans. We have seen unprecedented impact to life, health, and public safety from COVID-19 and taken action to prevent our healthcare system from being overburdened from COVID-19 patients. DHS was at the forefront mitigating threat and we took decisive action to restrict air and sea travel from disease hot-spots, close our land borders to non-essential travel, provide lifesaving PPE to Americans, prevent fraudulent PPE from entering our supply chains, and identify fraudsters who are trying to exploit this situation for their own personal gain."

"The domestic situation surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic creates an environment that could accelerate some individuals’ mobilization to targeted violence or radicalization to terrorism. Social distancing may lead to social isolation, which is associated with depression, increased anxiety, and social alienation. Similarly, work disruptions, including unexpected unemployment and layoffs, can also increase risk factors associated with radicalization to violence and willingness to engage in acts of targeted violence."

"According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention... Americans, regardless of age group, are far more likely to die of something other than COVID-19. Even among those in the most heavily impacted age group (85 and older), only 11.1 percent of all deaths since February 2020 were due to COVID-19."

"COVID-19 has shown us the tip of the iceberg of the lack of health equity. Socio-economic status, food security, affordable housing, access to childcare and health care, systemic racism and discrimination all contribute to disparities in the effects of COVID-19 and other diseases."