There will be no live audience for the 15 March Democratic presidential debate between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Both Biden and Sanders canceled rallies in Ohio Tuesday night because of COVID-19.
Conversely, President Trump’s campaign announced a new rally in Wisconsin on March 19.
Campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said the rallies would continue despite National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases head Anthony Fauci’s recommendation against such large public gatherings.
“The president is the best authority on this issue. He takes into consult the words of everyone around him, that would include [Health and Human Services Secretary] Alex Azar, that would include Dr. Fauci, that would include others. So, I’ll leave it to the president,” McEnany said. “Right now, we’re proceeding as normal.”
In a press conference today, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, “In the past two weeks, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased 13-fold, and the number of affected countries has tripled …. This is the first pandemic caused by coronavirus,” he said, and the first pandemic that WHO has declared since 2009. He also said that WHO is “deeply concerned, both by the alarming levels of spread and severity and by the alarming levels of inaction [emphasis added].”
Via Memo from a News Hound, the number of identified COVID-19 cases in the United States at 23:00 Pacific on March 10, 2020.
