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How much does Donald Trump still pay attention to coronavirus? The task force convened in the early days of the outbreak here in the US no longer meets every day. Instead, it meets just once a week. The president himself has not given one of his televised updates on the spread of the disease for several weeks.
Bret Giroir, the man brought in to be the White House testing czar, says he is about to leave and return to his day job at the health department. And Anthony Fauci, the doctor who has become the public face of the administration's response to the disease, says it has been around two weeks since he last heard from or even saw the president. All this is taking place against the backdrop of a spike in cases in certain parts of the US, especially in states which exited lockdown early. In Florida, in California, in Texas, we are seeing daily case rates up or around their record highs. There's also been a sharp jump in both Arizona and Oregon.
Now the president says he wants states to take the lead from here on in in terms of how to respond to the disease, but some public experts say that the federal government still needs to play a major role, not least in making sure that there are enough tests to do what's called track and trace. That's the strategy of widespread testing and then isolating not only any new patients, but also anybody they've come into contact with in the previous few days. That, say scientists, is the only safe way to exit from lockdown while we still don't have a vaccine.
Now of course, there are other issues which have risen up the political agenda here in the US in the last few weeks, not least race relations in the wake of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer. But some in the public health community worry that with the president keen to move on from talking about the pandemic, the White House is taking its eye off the ball at just the wrong moment.
