President Trump slammed Dr. Deborah Birx on Twitter after she said the pandemic was “extraordinarily widespread.”

Said Trump: “So Crazy Nancy Pelosi said horrible things about Dr. Deborah Birx, going after her because she was too positive on the very good job we are doing on combatting the China Virus, including Vaccines & Therapeutics. In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us. Pathetic!”

CNN: “While Trump and other top White House officials have publicly attacked Dr. Anthony Fauci, the tweet marked the first time Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, publicly drew Trump’s ire.”

Ed Yong: “How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.”

“Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer.”

The CDC predicts that up to 11,000 people will die every week this month from the coronavirus, CBS News reports.

Dr. Deborah Birx said the US is in a new phase in its fight against the coronavirus pandemic, saying that the deadly virus is more widespread than when it first took hold in the US earlier this year, CNN reports.

Said Birx: “What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread. It’s into the rural as equal urban areas.”

She added: “To everybody who lives in a rural area, you are not immune or protected from this virus. If you’re in multi-generational households, and there’s an outbreak in your rural area or in your city, you need to really consider wearing a mask at home, assuming that you’re positive, if you have individuals in your households with comorbidities.”

“The coronavirus is spreading at dangerous levels across much of the United States, and public health experts are demanding a dramatic reset in the national response, one that recognizes that the crisis is intensifying and that current piecemeal strategies aren’t working,” the Washington Post reports.

“This is a new phase of the pandemic, one no longer built around local or regional clusters and hot spots. It comes at an unnerving moment in which the economy suffered its worst collapse since the Great Depression, schools are rapidly canceling plans for in-person instruction and Congress has failed to pass a new emergency relief package. President Trump continues to promote fringe science, the daily death toll keeps climbing and the human cost of the virus in America has just passed 150,000 lives.”

President Trump publicly rebuked Dr. Anthony Fauci, forcefully rejecting the nation’s top infectious disease expert’s testimony on why the U.S. has experienced a renewed surge in coronavirus cases, Politico reports.

“Wrong!” Trump wrote in a retweet of a video where Fauci explained to a House subcommittee that the U.S. has seen more cases than European countries because it only shut down a fraction of its economy amid the pandemic.

Said Trump: “We have more cases because we have tested far more than any other country, 60,000,000. If we tested less, there would be less cases.”

The CDC is forecasting that the total American death toll from COVID-19 could hit 182,000 by the fourth week of August, Yahoo News reports.

“The new projection, which has not yet been publicly released, contradicts the more optimistic portrait that President Trump and others in his administration have painted about the pandemic.”

Vanity Fair: “Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically.”

Said one expert: “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”

“That logic may have swayed Kushner.”

Brookings: “There is no relationship—visually or statistically—between school districts’ reopening decisions and their county’s new COVID-19 cases per capita. In contrast, there is a strong relationship—visually and statistically—between districts’ reopening decisions and the county-level support for Trump in the 2016 election.”

“Districts located in counties that supported Trump are much more likely to have announced plans to open in person. On average, districts that have announced plans to reopen in person are located in counties in which 55% voted for Trump in 2016, compared to 35% in districts that have announced plans for remote learning only.”

“More than 500 State Department employees are privately pleading with the Trump administration to pull back its decision to send up to 80 percent of its staff members in Washington back to work in person after an employee who works near Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s office tested positive for the coronavirus this week,” NBC News reports.

Vanity Fair: “Six months into the pandemic, the United States continues to suffer the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the developed world. Considerable blame belongs to a federal response that offloaded responsibility for the crucial task of testing to the states. The irony is that, after assembling the team that came up with an aggressive and ambitious national testing plan, Kushner then appears to have decided, for reasons that remain murky, to scrap its proposal.”

The plan, according to one participant, “just went poof into thin air.”

Multiple public health officials under Presidents Bush and Obama who spoke with ABC News described the painstaking lengths to which previous administrations planned for viral infectious disease pandemics.

“Many of those same officials condemned the Trump administration for failing to execute on the strategies gathered as a result of those efforts, such as taking early and aggressive science-based actions, clear communication to the public, and collaboration with international and state partners.”

“Others accused the president of exacerbating matters by shuttering a NSC office specifically tasked with pandemic response preparedness.”