US economy

Trump claims US is 'rounding the corner' as coronavirus death toll nears 200,000 – as it happened


From Lauren Gambino and David Smith in Washington and Joanna Walters in New York:

Biden has branded Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic “almost criminal” after book revelations that the US president admitted in early February the disease was “deadly stuff” but deliberately played it down.

As the death toll from Covid-19 nears 200,000 in America, the world’s highest, Biden excoriated his opponent in November’s election over the way he did not address the defining crisis of his presidency early and comprehensively.

“He waved the white flag,” Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview scheduled to be aired in full on Thursday afternoon. “He walked away. He didn’t do a damn thing – think about it! And it’s almost criminal.”

Bob Woodward’s new book, Rage, highlights of which were revealed in his newspaper the Washington Post on Wednesday, features 18 interviews with Trump from late 2019 and into the early summer of 2020, covering the start and the peak of the pandemic in the US. Totalling nine hours, the interviews were recorded and are therefore impossible for Trump to deny.

Woodward, a veteran journalist who helped break the Watergate scandal in the 70s that eventually brought down President Richard Nixon, discloses that in early February this year, just as the first infections were emerging in the US, Trump knew the extent of the deadly coronavirus threat.

And the president had been told that it was an airborne disease, and much deadlier than influenza, but he intentionally misled the public by deciding to “play it down”, saying it was under control when it wasn’t and predicting the virus would “disappear”. At the same time he was conceding to Woodward that “this is deadly stuff”.

On 7 February he told Woodward in a phone call: “It goes through the air. That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”



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