As executive director of the health department in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Bruce Dart has worked night and day alongside his staff to flatten the COVID-19 curve. “We started to trend downward,” he said. Hospitals got a breather and a chance to work on their “surge plans.”
But then, on June 10, with cases beginning to rise about six weeks into the governor’s aggressive effort to reopen the economy, Dart got almost unimaginably bad news: President Donald Trump was planning a massive political rally at the 19,000-seat BOK Center in Tulsa, essentially painting a viral bull’s-eye on the city. “It was all over Twitter,” said Dart, “and my marketing director brought it up.”
Helpless to stop the event, Dart now fears the worst. “I am personally extremely concerned not only for what is going to happen this weekend, but what we’re going to have to deal with two weeks from now,” he told Vanity Fair. “I think we’re in the potential for a perfect storm of disease transmission that Tulsa County does not need.” Calling the risks “horrific,” he added, “This could be a Beyoncé concert and I’d still feel the same way.”
On Tuesday, former vice president Dick Cheney’s cardiologist, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, went a step further, calling Trump’s plan for the rally “criminal endangerment” that was risking lives.
One day before President Trump embarks on the most potentially hazardous political rally in modern American history—a potential super-spreader event of possibly unmasked supporters shouting slogans in a packed indoor stadium—Oklahoma public health officials can only watch in dismay as their around-the-clock efforts to ramp up testing and procure protective supplies go up in a cloud of contagious aerosol droplets.
They are not alone.
As COVID-19 cases rise sharply in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, and Texas, according to a Washington Post analysis, state public health officials find themselves fighting twin epidemics, one medical and the other political.
Even before the Tulsa rally, President Trump had become a super-spreader of lies, disinformation, and counterproductive messaging. He has repeatedly cast doubt on the only effective tools for fighting the virus—widespread testing, wearing masks, staying six feet apart—as a liberal hoax to restrict America’s freedoms. And he has goaded his followers to resist stay-at-home orders, helping to inspire heavily armed protesters to occupy the Michigan state capitol in April.
As Trump told the Wall Street Journal yesterday, testing for COVID-19 is “overrated.” He added that, in his view, “some Americans wore facial coverings not as a preventive measure but as a way to signal disapproval of him.”
Trump’s blithe dismissals of established science have led to pitched battles in red states, pitting lone voices of rationality against Republican governors, eager to demonstrate their fealty to President Trump.
In Texas, as county officials enacted mask requirements and other restrictions, Governor Greg Abbott moved to usurp their authority. He prohibited local officials from penalizing those who didn’t comply with mask directives, thus rendering their directives toothless.
In Dallas, County Judge Clay Jenkins fought to overturn Abbott’s prohibition. “Right now, he’s listening to President Trump and the Tea Party,” said Jenkins. “They see any restrictions as infringements on their personal liberty.”
This week, facing stiff opposition from local officials and medical providers, Abbott retreated from his hard line on mask rules. So did Governor Doug Ducey in Arizona. Not coincidentally, cases of COVID-19 have been skyrocketing in both states.
None of these ideological battles impress the virus, which has continued spreading relentlessly in red and blue states alike. On Wednesday, an Arizona sheriff in Pinal County, Mark Lamb, who had refused to enforce lockdown orders, announced that he had tested positive. He found out thanks to a mandatory test at the White House, where he’d been invited to watch President Trump sign an executive order on policing.