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Trump’s Coronavirus Disinformation Campaign Isn’t Working: Poll

 
TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
The president has presented an overly rosy picture about how the fight against the virus is going. A new poll suggests the public isn’t buying it.

SAM STEINMar. 28, 2020 8:31 PM ET

A clear majority of the American public, including self-identified Republicans, do not believe the disinformation that President Donald Trump keeps pushing around the spread of coronavirus. And even members of the president’s own party are skeptical of his argument that getting the country back to work needs to be as prioritized as public safety measures. 

A new survey conducted by Ipsos exclusively for The Daily Beast provides some of the clearest evidence to date that the president’s attempts to paint a rosy picture about the coronavirus’ spread throughout the country are not resonating beyond a small segment of the populace with a small exception for those who say they’re getting their information from Fox News. 

  • A full 73 percent of respondents, including 75 percent of Republicans, said that it was not true that “anyone who wants to get tested [for the virus] can get tested.” Just 17 percent said it was true.
  • Only 20 percent of the public, and just 25 percent of Republicans, said that they believed a vaccine will be available soon. Forty-two percent said that was false and 38 percent said they did not know.
  • Fifty-one percent of respondents, including a plurality or Republicans (46 percent), said it was false that the virus would go away on its own in warm weather, while just 13 percent said that was true.
  • And 61 percent of respondents said that they believed COVID-19 was more deadly than the flu; with 22 percent saying it was about the same and 11 percent saying they believed it was less deadly.

The question that seemed to generate the most confusion was on whether the Federal Drug Administration had “approved anti-malaria drugs to treat the virus.”

But even then, 45 percent of respondents correctly identified that statement as false, 22 percent said it was true and 33 percent said they did not know.

Collectively, the results present a portrait of a public that is sober minded about the coronavirus and unpersuaded by talk that life could return to normalcy soon. Over the past few weeks, Trump has suggested that the spread of coronavirus would abate as the temperature warmed. He’s repeatedly insisted that those who want a test can get one, against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He’s downplayed the lethality of it by comparing it to the flu. He’s talked about a vaccine hitting the markets in weeks, if not months, and pushed hydroxychloroquine as a therapy for coronavirus, despite his own medical experts warning that there is nothing more than anecdotal data suggesting it could work. 

That Trump has had difficulty selling the public on these ideas suggests that he is operating from a trust deficit as he encounters the most existential challenge of his presidency to date. Though self-identified Fox News viewers were more likely to believe these claims than those who got their information from local news, national news or other cable channels, even they were skeptical of the president’s posture. Just 20 percent of those who watched the Trump-supportive cable channel said they believed anyone could get a test if they wanted to; just 31 percent said a vaccine would be available soon; and just 15 percent said the virus would go away in the warm weather. However, 44 percent of those who said they were getting their information from Fox News said that they believed the FDA had approved anti-malaria drugs to treat COVID-19, compared to 34 percent who said that was false. 

Fox News viewers were evenly split when it came to Trump’s most recent focus: getting American businesses back up and running on an expedited timeline even if it were to involve public health risk. Forty-seven percent of Fox News viewers said they agreed with the sentiment while 50 percent said they did not. 

But beyond that, the public was largely in favor of keeping public safety measures in place, even if it meant delaying a return to economic activity. Just 26 percent of respondents said that they agreed that “getting people back to work is more important than social distancing” while 69 percent said they disagreed. Those numbers were similar when isolating just for Republicans, with 57 percent disagreeing and 39 percent agreeing. 

Though the public may not be with him on his descriptions of and prescriptions for the coronavirus crisis, Trump has earned relatively positive views for his handling of the pandemic. Public opinion polls have consistently shown more people approving of the job he’s doing than disapproving. The Ipsos survey suggests one potential explanation as to why: self-identified Independents were relatively comfortable with the president’s push to start focusing on the economy. 

The survey found that 46 percent of Independents believed that the “cost to slow the spread of COVID-19 is too much for our economy to bear” compared to 39 percent who said they disagreed. Meanwhile, 39 percent of Independents said “getting people back to work is more important than social distancing”—the same percentage as for Republicans. A solid chunk of Independents (31 percent) even said that they believed “The media and Democrats are overstating the COVID-19 threat in order to damage Donald Trump’s presidency.” 

 
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The 38-year-old mother had experienced a complicated pregnancy, made riskier by Type 2 diabetes and a liver condition that causes bile to build up in the blood. On March 19, in her 37th week, she went to Columbia University Medical Center in New York City to be induced. Neither she nor her husband reported any of the worrisome symptoms that health care providers are watching for to screen for COVID-19, such as fever, cough, shortness of breath or sore throat. In fact, the woman’s temperature was slightly below normal, at 98.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

 
 
 
 

Then, while the woman was in labor, her temperature climbed to 101.3. Suspecting that she had developed a potentially dangerous bacterial infection called chorioamnionitis, her care team gave her antibiotics and acetaminophen, which seemed to stabilize her. But labor was progressing slowly, and doctors decided to perform a cesarean section. As they were stitching up their patient, she began to hemorrhage uncontrollably. The team raced to intubate her, but her breathing rapidly worsened. When doctors finally had her condition under control, they decided to evaluate her for COVID-19. She tested positive.

The woman, whose case was described in a short report published Thursday in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, is one of seven pregnant patients at CUMC in recent days who turned out to have the coronavirus. Two of those women had no apparent symptoms when they arrived at the hospital, only to deteriorate soon after giving birth; both required admission to the intensive care unit.

 

CUMC is part of the NewYork-Presbyterian medical system, which announced on March 22 that it would no longer allow women who come to the system to give birth to bring in outside support to help them through labor and recovery — no husbands, no sisters, no doulas. Some 25,000 women give birth in the system’s eight maternity hospitals every year.

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25 minutes ago, 17to85 said:

Jason Kenney being an *******, nothing new here. Same as he ever was. Just gotta ride out the next several years and hope people have smartened the **** up next election. 

Can't blame Kenney entirely any more than Trump is completely to blame for the current state of affairs in the USA. They are more accurately symptoms than the causes- their followers and the passive rest of the voters who remain silent and inactive. We tend to get the governments we deserve and there are a lot of people in Alberta who are unwilling to accept that oil is no longer king and that the fat times in Alberta are gone for good. Petroleum demand was falling for several years before now and will never recover to the extent it was in the 90's and 2000's and woe betide the Alberta politician who says that out loud.

 

 

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