President Donald Trump’s all-time low rating on his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic is threatening his re-election chances by enabling former Vice President Joe Biden to expand the Electoral map, according to polls released by CBS/YouGov on Sunday.
According to an ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week, 67 percent disapprove of the way Trump is “handling the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19)” while just 33 percent approve. It is Trump’s lowest mark since polling organizations started surveying Coronavirus issues in March.
And these low marks are hurting Trump in critical Sun Belt states that are now Coronavirus hot spots. The CBS/YouGov polls found that Biden leads by Trump by six points in the critical swing state of Florida and is virtually tied with the president in Arizona and Texas.
The polling found that “Biden has made gains in part because most say their state’s efforts to contain the virus are going badly — and the more concerned voters are about risks from the outbreak, the more likely they are to support Biden.”
The polls found that nearly seven-in-10 voters in these states are taking the Coronavirus crisis very seriously, and “nine in 10 Biden backers cite the coronavirus outbreak as a major factor in their vote, more so than the economy.”
Nearly six-in-10 voters in these important states believe their states re-opened too soon, and nearly seven-in-10 voters in these three states think their states re-opened “under pressure from the Trump administration.”
Nationally, ABC/Ipsos found that Trump’s Coronavirus approval rating plummeted because of “plunging support among independents and even waning support among Republicans.”
Just 26 percent of independents approve of Trump’s handling of the Coronavirus pandemic compared to 40 percent in mid-June while “Trump’s disapproval among independents has risen to 73%, up from 59% in the June poll.”
While 90 percent of Republicans approved of his Coronavirus response in mid-June, just 78 percent do now. In addition, according to ABC/Ipsos, Trump’s 22 percent disapproval rating among Republicans now “is a more than two-fold increase from last month.”
Perhaps even more importantly, the poll found that “even white Americans without a college degree, considered to be a core constituency of Trump’s base, are split in their approval of the president’s handling, with 50% disapproving and 49% approving, compared to 42% disapproving and 57% approving in that last poll.”
Trump’s Coronavirus approval rating may be the most important number in predicting the 2020 presidential election.
CNN recently pointed out “just how correlated coronavirus is to feelings about the election right now” and noted that “it’s actually more predictive of voting for” former Vice President Joe Biden “than disapproval of Trump’s job performance.”
In the most recent CNN poll , which found that Biden had a 14-point national lead, “among the voters who said Biden would be better at handling the pandemic, 96% said they’d vote for Biden. Trump took a mere 2% of those voters.” Biden also won “92% of those who disapprove of Trump’s overall job performance. Trump won 3% of those voters.”
As CNN noted, this trend has been consistent in numerous other polls. For instance, a recent Pew Research national poll “found that 52% of voters were confident that Biden could deal with coronavirus. Only 41% said the same about Trump.” Biden had a 10-point lead over Trump in that national poll.
US posts a one-day high in COVID-19 cases with health systems on the verge of collapse
With the United States leading the way as the worst-affected country, the number of coronavirus cases and deaths worldwide continues to soar, reaching 14 million infections today, and threatening to reach 600,000 total deaths by tomorrow. Yesterday, 5,736 more people succumbed to COVID-19, according to the Worldometer tracker.
Three countries, Brazil, India and the United States, account for more than 50 percent of all new cases. Yesterday, the United States posted its highest one-day number of new cases with 73,388 and 963 fatalities, approaching 3.7 million cases, with 141,000 deaths.
Almost alone among major countries, the United States has significant sections of its political elite who are acting as open advocates of spreading the virus so that the population will be forced to achieve “herd immunity,” regardless of the cost in human lives.
Cars forming a line for COVID-19 testing in Texas (Credit: Verónica G. Cárdenas)
This is the de facto policy of the capitalist ruling classes all over the world. But few have gone as far publicly as Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, a Republican allied with President Trump, who issued an executive order that combines pigheaded stupidity and criminal indifference to public health. It forbids city governments in his state to require the wearing of masks by people who are out in public places.
Perverting the slogan of “individual freedom,” Kemp explicitly singled out cities like Atlanta, Savannah, Athens and Augusta, whose mask requirements are now rescinded. Kemp upholds the “right” of the “free individual” to contract COVID-19 and then pass it on to friends, relatives, workmates, and people passing by in the street, without imposing the “heavy hand of government” through requiring a simple facemask.
Earlier in the month, over 1,400 health care workers signed a letter warning the governor that the state was ill-prepared to face a surge of new cases. Georgia reported 3,871 new cases on Thursday. At Navicent Health, the largest health care system in the state, a health worker told Georgia Public Broadcast News, “They were lined up along the walls in the ER … when you have to start shipping patients out of state, it's bad. When the hospitals are full, that's when it becomes really dangerous for everybody.”
Not only Georgia, but Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona and California are seeing a continuous influx of patients into emergency rooms. Except for California, these states are recording positivity rates in their COVID-19 testing above 15 percent with Arizona at 24 percent. These figures demonstrate that the pandemic is spreading uncontrollably through the population as a consequence of weeks of reopening businesses and encouraging people to resume normal activities and drop their guard against the killer virus.
Alabama's Lieutenant Governor Will Ainsworth publicly rebuked Governor Kay Ivey's statewide mandate to wear masks in public for a month. “The mandate is an overstep that infringes upon the property rights of business owners and the ability of individuals to make their own health decisions,” he declared.
Meanwhile, the number of cases in the state has exploded since the end of June. On Wednesday, Alabama reported its largest single day of deaths from COVID-19 with 47 fatalities. The Alabama Department of Corrections announced the death of two inmates on the same day. Thirty-four inmates have tested positive since July 10. Also, a COVID-19 outbreak at Alabama's largest food bank, serving 35 counties and over 300,000 residents, threatens their operations.
Many health professionals and public health officials have called for another lockdown to gain breathing room to deal with the growing crisis in earnest. However, the Trump administration and state governors, Democrat and Republican alike, are opposed to such measures. Even in Texas, where the state is facing a collapse of its healthcare infrastructure, Governor Greg Abbott walked back his assertion from last week that “the next step would have to be a lockdown.” He told KRIV-TV in Houston emphatically, “Let me tell you, there is no shutdown coming.”
On July 14, Texas posted a one-day high of 10,751 new cases. On July 15, it also grimly noted 110 new deaths, its highest one-day toll since the beginning of the pandemic. Meanwhile, several hard-hit counties in Texas are bringing in freezer trucks as makeshift morgues. ICUs and hospitals are attempting to find room in their facilities that are brimming with patients. Ambulances are on bypass or have to hold patients in their cabins for several hours before a bed is located for them. Many of these new COVID-19 patients come from low-income populations who have to work with their hands and suffer from chronic diabetes and high blood pressure.
Though the number of cases in Arizona seems to have plateaued, 90 percent of hospital beds are in use, and with the scarcity of resources, there is rationing of medical care. Dr. Murtaza Akhter, an emergency room medicine physician at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, said, “The fear is we are going to have to start sharing ventilators, or we're gonna have to start saying, 'you get a vent, you don't!' I'd be really surprised if, in a couple of weeks, we didn't have to do that.”
Several counties in southern California are also facing shortages of resources for COVID-19 patients. Like his Republican counterparts, Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom is putting into place half measures, closing some businesses and issuing a statewide mask mandate. Cases in the state of Washington are also on the rise. Since the middle of June, Washington has seen more than 700 new cases each day.
The pandemic’s impact would be multiplied many times over if states go ahead with plans to reopen public school systems in August and September, bringing 50 million children into an environment where they will be unable to social distance and otherwise protect themselves from infection, which will spread to teachers and other school staff, and will go home to parents, grandparents and other caregivers.
President Trump has threatened to cut funding from schools if they don't open. Asked by the press about his response to an Arizona teacher who contracted COVID-19 at a summer school and died, Trump seemed to feel nothing, and reiterated his demand that all schools reopen for five-day, in-person instruction. This is demanded by corporate America, in order to push through the back-to-work drive against the resistance of the working class.
The Democrats seek to profit politically from Trump’s obvious indifference to sickness and death, as well as the sheer incompetence of the White House response, but they represent the same class interests. No prominent Democrat is calling for a second national lockdown to stop the virus transmission and use the opportunity to begin the implementation of a broad public health initiative that would include mass testing, contact tracing and isolation of those who test positive.
According to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll, only one in four Americans believes it would be safe to reopen schools this fall, while more than half felt such a move would be dangerous. Forty percent of parents polled said they would probably keep their children home if classes are back in session.
At Monday's World Health Organization briefing, Dr. Mike Ryan replied as follows to a question on school openings, in words that apply most directly to the United States: “The problem we have in some countries right now is that it is very difficult to determine the safety of any environment because there is just so much transmission going on that all potential environments that people mix are essentially problematic … There are real issues in how schools can be reopened safely, but the best and safest way to reopen schools is in the context of low community transmission that has been effectively suppressed by a broad-based comprehensive strategy … Schools are a hugely important part of this. They are a hugely important part of our social, educational architecture. They are the baseline of our civilization, but we can't turn schools into yet another political football in this game.”
Millions of Americans are losing health insurance as joblessness skyrockets
Over the course of the past five months, millions of American workers have lost their health insurance as the coronavirus pandemic has ignited a jobs bloodbath and threatened wide layers of the population with destitution.
Ever since mid-March, the United States has seen an exponential spike in joblessness due to the acceleration of the pandemic’s spread. For 15 straight weeks, more than a million people have filed for unemployment insurance. An estimated 32 million Americans are currently receiving federal and state financial aid.
These conditions have produced a health care crisis of unprecedented dimensions as more American workers have been stripped of employer-based insurance at a number higher than any recorded full year of insurance losses. The pandemic has left approximately 5.4 million American workers uninsured between February and May, according to an analysis released Tuesday by the nonpartisan consumer advocacy group Families USA. Their data found that the number of uninsured during this period was nearly 40 percent higher than the 3.9 million reported at the peak of the great recession of 2008 and 2009.
A health insurance claim form (Credit: Flickr.com, franchise opportunities)
The study released under Families USA found that nearly 46 percent of the coverage losses from the pandemic came in only five states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, and North Carolina. In Texas alone, the number of uninsured rose from 4.3 million to nearly 4.9 million, and three out of every 10 residents in Texas are considered uninsured.
For the 37 states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, 23 percent of workers that were laid off became uninsured. This percentage jumps to 43 percent in the 13 states that did not expand Medicaid, including Texas, Florida, and North Carolina. It’s worth noting that both Texas and Florida are experiencing massive surges of COVID-19 infections as a result of the reckless and premature reopening plans prosecuted by the political establishment.
Families USA also discovered that five states have experienced increases in the number of uninsured adults that exceeded 40 percent. In Massachusetts, one of the hardest hit states, the number of uninsured rose by 93 percent after business shutdowns and lockdown measures were imposed, which accelerated the massive joblessness and removal from employer-based coverage. Massachusetts has been one of the most significant hotspots for the spread of the coronavirus since mid-March, with confirmed cases currently standing at 112,000 and nearly 9,000 deaths.
The report identifies eight states where 20 percent or more of adults are without health insurance: Florida, Texas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Nevada, South Carolina and North Carolina. Of these states, all except Oklahoma are among the 15 states that are experiencing the highest spike in COVID-19 cases.
In addition to this analysis, Families USA notes that this situation has worsened given the fact there is no federal relief program in place that could reverse the harrowing conditions workers and their families face. This neglect, they acknowledge, is the conscious policy of both capitalist parties, which are well aware of the connection between insurance and improved health outcomes, financial security, and economic recovery.
Even though official data won’t be released until 2021 when the federal government produces its report on health insurance enrollments for the previous year, current numbers from medical journals and scientific studies in the US estimate that 16 percent of US adults, or 1 in 7, are without any health insurance at all.
Authors of the Families USA research study borrowed data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and raised alarm in their published paper on the high rates of individuals without health insurance, stressing that this “is particularly problematic during a pandemic involving a highly infectious, deadly disease, especially in states that are allowing residents to be in closer personal contact by attempting to reopen their economies” adding that these are “often the same states that are now experiencing significant spikes in COVID-19 infection rates.”
Health scientists and medical professionals have cited the health dangers that the population faces not just due to the unabated spread of the virus from the ruling class’ homicidal back-to-work agenda, but also the harmful consequences of delays in diagnosis and treatment because of lack of insurance for individuals and communities.
Diseases such as cancer and heart ailments “are more likely to worsen until hospitalization is required or treatment becomes ineffective.” The researchers continue by noting “losing health insurance thus makes permanent health problems—and even early death—significantly more likely for conditions unrelated to COVID-19.” These are forcing families that are already under significant economic strain to decide between paying for critical medical treatment out of pocket or buying other essential necessities.
In early May, the non-partisan Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) conducted an analysis that included workers who lost Employer-Sponsored Insurance (ESI), and the potential consequences for those who lost dependent coverage due to a family member losing a job and ESI benefits. That study estimated that nearly 27 million people, including relatives and spouses, signed on to a worker’s ESI could potentially become uninsured in the oncoming months.
KFF noted that some individuals who otherwise lose ESI are able to retain job-based coverage by switching to a plan offered to a family member. This is only viable for a very small portion of people, 1.6 million, who have another source of coverage in their family beyond their own loss of insurance. Even with this maneuver, it’s incredibly unlikely in the US for someone to find adequate healthcare coverage, if any at all. Data from the US Census Bureau indicates that 27.5 million Americans had no health insurance in 2018.
Those who are losing coverage would face unsustainable costs if they are struck with COVID-19, which has sent most of the seriously ill to Intensive Care Units for weeks and some even months. The average cost to treat a person with the novel coronavirus can range up to $30,000, according to a released in April by America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group of insurers.
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