July 5, 2020

Texas Torpedoes Presidential Prognosis
with Reality Check on COVID-19 Danger

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor

Texas and other red states are making President Donald Trump look like he's either lying to the nation or shockingly misinformed at best with the claim that 99 percent of the coronavirus cases have been totally harmless.

The Lone Star State is proving Trump to be wrong with his latest virus diagnosis with almost 9 percent of the people in Texas with active infections on Sunday in hospitals that are jam-packed in the midst of the second and far more serious second surge that the president refuses to acknowledge.

Texas set a record today for the 26th time in the past 28 days with 8,161 coronavirus patients in hospitals here according to the Department of State Health Services.

Texas had at least 97,430 active COVID-19 cases with a record 8,258 new infections on Saturday when Trump celebrated the Fourth of July with a spectacular fireworks display in Washington D.C as the holiday that commemorates the nation's freedom was effectively cancelled across the rest of a country that the virus has terrorized for four months.

With plans for an in-person national convention with no safety protocols in Jacksonville next month, the president might be dismayed to learn that the hospitalization rate in Florida is almost identical to Texas and substantially worse in other southern Republican states.

The percentages of people who were hospitalized with coronavirus cases in Georgia and Mississippi were 13 percent and 11 percent respectively on Sunday when they hovered at 23 percent in New York, 22 percent in Connecticut and 16 percent in Maryland, Kentucky and Virginia.

More than 14 percent of the people in Ohio with active coronavirus cases spent Independence Day in hospitals compared to 15 percent in Indiana and almost 11 percent in Massachusetts as the state that had been the launching pad for the American revolution.

The Texas neighbors of New Mexico and Oklahoma posted COVID-19 hospitalization rates of 15 percent and 12 percent respectively on the day that the president declared that only 1 percent pose a threat to the health of Americans. .

GOP loyalists who plan to flock to Florida for Trump's second coronation as the White House nominee could be rethinking travel plans with the Sunshine State relegating Texas to second-fiddle epicenter status with more than 196.000 of 200,000 total cases currently active and 16,000 in hospitals on July 4th.

Almost 7 percent of the people with active coronavirus cases in Arizona and Alabama where the virus has been raging out of control spent Independence Day suffering in hospitals.

But borrowed a page from Governor Greg Abbott's playbook from April and May when he assured Texans that the state had the virus under control after some emergency testing efforts in the Panhandle and East Texas that were original hot spots as a consequence of outbreaks in meat processing plants and prisons.

“We’ve made a lot of progress, our strategy is moving along well,” Trump said on Saturday. “It goes out in one area and rears back its ugly face in another area, but we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned how to put out the flame.”

Trump hadn't been compelled to address the worst crisis in the U.S. in modern times during a speech on Friday night at Mount Rushmore where he painted an apocalyptic picture of a United States under siege by radical left-wing extremists who he likened to Nazis and communists. Trump gave the impression that he thinks the destruction of tributes to a racist past is the singular objective of the social justice movement.