Day 1,265: Trump: U.S. in ‘good place’ as country sets another record for COVID-19 cases and ICUs hit capacity

The U.S. death toll from COVID-19 has topped 131,000. Hospitals are bursting at the seams and doctors have started weighing horrific decisions like how to divvy up precious medicine. PPE is running low again.

And as the U.S. hit a another daily record for positive cases on Tuesday — with states that previously laughed off the disease just weeks ago the main hot spots — a defensive Donald Trump swore that the U.S. is actually in a “good place,” disagreeing with actual scientists and experts.

“Well, I think we are in a good place. I disagree with [Dr. Fauci],” Trump said to Gray Television’s Greta Van Susteren, according to a transcript of the interview released Tuesday.

“Dr. Fauci said don’t wear masks and now he says wear them. And he said numerous things. Don’t close off China. Don’t ban China. I did it anyway. I didn’t listen to my experts and I banned China. We would have been in much worse shape.”

“We’ve done a good job,” the President said. “I think we are going to be in two, three, four weeks, by the time we next speak, I think we’re going to be in very good shape.”

Trump was responding to Fauci’s blunt assessment on the reality of where the U.S. is on the COVID-19 timeline.

“We are still knee-deep in the first wave of this. And I would say, this would not be considered a wave. It was a surge, or a resurgence of infections superimposed upon a baseline,” Fauci said in a Facebook Live interview with National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins.

COVID-19’s longevity and decimation has been a uniquely American problem, as new modeling projects over 200,000 deaths by November if the number of people wearing masks in public doesn’t quickly increase.

Trump is happy to shoo away facts and instead have those at a dialogue regarding the reopening of schools fawn all over him.

1,265 days in, 197 to go

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