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Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
This worrying seems hyperventilated and pretty weird. Because DJT dons (pun intended) a mask, all of a sudden millions of Americans will wake up from their lefty-media-induced torpor and realize just how commanding and brilliant our dear leader actually is? C'mon.

And October surprises are more likely to hit him than dull Joe.

The Mooch says Ghislaine "has the goods" on Trump

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resolve

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President Donald Trump keeps trying to change the subject. His Twitter feed and his rallies reveal an incumbent who probably doesn't want this election to be about the one issue dominating all of our lives right now: the coronavirus.

But make no mistake: Unless something changes dramatically, whichever candidate is trusted more to handle the virus will win the election.

Trump likely wants to switch topics because he realizes how poorly he is currently polling on the issue.

In poll after poll, voters say former Vice President Joe Biden is better equipped to handle the issue than Trump. A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that 52% of voters were confident that Biden could deal with coronavirus. Only 41% said the same about Trump.

You'll notice each of those percentages lined up nearly perfectly with the share of voters who would vote for each candidate. Biden earned 54% in the horse race to Trump's 44%. The pattern of vote choice being tied to feelings about the virus has been consistent for months.

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Coronavirus has managed to top at least 20% for the nation's most important problem in the last three Gallup polls (April, May and late May to early June). It's very rare for a non-economic problem to reach 20% in one month, let alone three consecutive months.

Now, there was a drop in the percentage who said coronavirus was the most important problem from May to early June.

However, the percentage who are worried about the virus has ticked up in recent weeks. The percentage who said they were at least moderately worried about the availability of hospital supplies, services and treatment jumped 10 points in Gallup's last poll. A record high 65% said they thought the coronavirus situation in the country was getting worse.

Indeed, that's the key facet of the pandemic: It doesn't seem like it's going away. Cases are surging. Experts believe a vaccine will arrive, but not before year's end at least. The chance that the virus is not at least near the top of the voters' minds come November seems small at this time.

What we're seeing in the polling now is exactly what we'd expect given history. I previously noted that we've had a number of elections where there was a non-economic issue at or near the top of voters' minds at the time of the election.

All of them had a consistent message: An incumbent who wins on the top non-economic issue is reelected. An incumbent who is not trusted on the issue either loses or drops out of the race.

For Trump, the data is clear. Either he has to convince voters he's the man they want over Biden to handle coronavirus, or he'll likely be defeated no matter how much he tries to shift the country's attention.

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whether people's attitudes towards masks could shift quickly enough to affect the current huge rise in cases

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“More and more studies show that kids are actually stoppers of the disease and they don’t get it and transmit it themselves, so we should be in a posture of — the default should be getting back to school kids in person, in the classroom.”

— Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, in an interview on “The Conservative Circus” (iHeart radio), July 16

Our eyes popped out when we first heard this comment by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, as she pressed the administration’s case for reopening schools in the fall with in-person classes.

Could children actually be “stoppers” of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus? That would be great news — if true. The interruption of school threatens to create a learning deficit — and many parents may find it difficult to return to work if children are not in classes.

An Education Department spokesperson supplied four reports from around the world:

American Academy of Pediatrics: Evidence suggests that children don’t contract or spread the virus the way adults do, in contrast to how they spread influenza.
New South Wales, Australia: Eighteen infected people who had contact with nearly 900 people resulted in only two additional infections, with “no evidence of children infecting teachers.”
France: An infected 9-year-old in France came into contact with 172 people while attending three ski schools, and none of them — not even the child’s siblings — appeared to contract the virus.
Saxony, Germany: A study (in German) found no evidence that schoolchildren play a role in spreading the virus, with a researcher quoted in a news report as saying that “children may even act as a brake on infection.”
“We’re mainly looking at the German study — one of the people who helped run it is the one who first said that kids can act as ‘brakes’ on virus transmission,” the Education Department spokesperson said.

Well, there’s a problem with that. The German study has not been peer-reviewed; it is still in preprint review by the Lancet, meaning it should not be used to guide clinical practice.

Moreover, the German researchers told The Fact Checker that the results do not apply to a country such as the United States, where infections have been soaring. Germany, by contrast, is among the countries that are considered to have handled the outbreak with skill and diligence, keeping infections per million people relatively low.

“Our results depict a situation with low infection rates after the initial transmission peak is under control,” Jakob Armann, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at University Children’s Hospital in Dresden and co-author of the study, said in an email. “If you have rising infection rates — as in the United States currently — putting people in close contact will obviously lead to transmission of respiratory viruses as SARS-CoV-2.”

The key, he said, is to get the situation under control, as most Europeans countries have. Then “there is a way to safely reopen schools and schoolchildren are not ‘hidden’ hotspots of transmission.”

Reinhard Berner, Armann’s colleague, made the “brake” comment, but Armann said his quote was “widely exaggerated through in the media.” (The phrase does not appear in the study.)

“The point he was trying to make is that these findings are in contrast to the earlier assumptions that children will spread the virus to a much higher degree than adults,” Armann said. “We are not trying to argue that children do not spread the virus at all, and you are absolutely right that in high-infection communities, children will get infected and will transmit to close contacts.”

It’s easy to find studies and news reports that contradict DeVos’s assertion

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Originally posted by Piano*Dad:
This worrying seems hyperventilated and pretty weird. Because DJT dons (pun intended) a mask, all of a sudden millions of Americans will wake up from their lefty-media-induced torpor and realize just how commanding and brilliant our dear leader actually is? C'mon.

And October surprises are more likely to hit him than dull Joe.

The Mooch says Ghislaine "has the goods" on Trump