Paul Krugman in NYT...Trump is killing us

In other words, we know what works. Which makes it both bizarre and frightening that Donald Trump has apparently decided to spend the final weeks of his re-election campaign deriding and discouraging mask-wearing and other anti-pandemic precautions.

Trump’s behavior on this and other issues is sometimes described as a rejection of science, which is true as far as it goes.

Just hours passed between Redfield’s declaration, in congressional testimony, that masks are “the most important, powerful public health tool we have” in fighting the pandemic and Trump saying that “there’s a lot of problems with masks.”

You sometimes see people suggesting that wearing face masks is somehow inconsistent with America’s individualistic culture. And if that were true it would be a condemnation of that culture.

After all, there’s something very wrong with any definition of freedom that includes the right to gratuitously expose other people to the risk of disease and death — which is what refusing to wear a mask in a pandemic amounts to.

And it’s probably too late to change the views of the majority of voters believing that he has given up on fighting the coronavirus.

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So his latest ploy is an attempt to convince people that the Covid-19 threat is over. But widespread mask-wearing is a constant reminder that the virus is still out there. Hence Trump’s renewed push against the simplest, most sensible of public health precautions.

As a political strategy, this ploy probably won’t work. But it will lead to a lot of unnecessary deaths.

nyti.ms/3c8W0rx

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