President Super-Spreader Went To Arizona

You know those magic air filters that killed all the COVID-19 in the church where Trump spoke? Turns out that was maybe not true.

We have a surprising update on a story we told you yesterday morning, a development you never saw coming. It turns out the magic air filters installed at the Phoenix church where Donald Trump spoke Tuesday do not actually Hoover all the COVID-19 particles out of the air like a great sucking miracle from Jesus. And the company that makes them doesn't even claim they do! What a mess, how did these church guys get this so very wrong?

Those guys, the senior pastor and the COO of the Dream City chain of churches (there are a bunch of 'em in Phoenix, one of those strip mall drive-by Jesus operations, sounds like), said company CleanAir EXP made a special doohickey appliance that, through the process of ionization (a word the COO could not pronounce), sucked 99.9 percent of the COVID-19s out of the air and killed them dead.

But now their video is deleted, and the company what makes the doohickeys is like "we didn't say that."

Huh.

First of all, remember how we all learned at the beginning of the pandemic that "coronavirus" refers to a whole family of viruses, and not just COVID-19? There's also the one that causes SARS and the one that causes MERS, and anyway, the doohickeys work on other coronaviruses, but haven't been tested on our new fancy coronavirus, COVID-19:

According to Clean Air EXP, the system can eliminate 99.9% of airborne coronavirus test surrogates from Coronavirus 229E and Cystovirus Phi6 – not COVID-19, specifically.

Also too, according to a science expert CBS News talked to, Jeffrey Siegel from the University of Toronto, the kind of tests CleanAir EXP did are kinda crap for determining what COVID-19 would do in a church full of 3,000 unwashed, unmasked Trump idiots. And:

Aside from the unrealistic testing that was done for this filtration system, Siegel said, "there's no filter or air cleaner in the world that could reduce risk in a crowded, indoor environment."

Oh. The church is sorry for its unscientific boo-boo:

"We have heard coronavirus and COVID used interchangeably. Our statement regarding the CleanAir EXP units used the word COVID when we should have said coronavirus or COVID surrogates," the [church said in a statement]. "We hope to alleviate any confusion we may have caused."

All good, we're sure it's fine. The statement continued, saying that while the third party testing of the magic doohickeys might not have found the thing they thought it found, "their coronavirus surrogate testing results are significant for the future of clean air." So that sounds pretty neat! We're talking about the very "future of clean air" here!

All this brings us to Trump's big Super-Spreader day in Arizona. First he went to Yuma to brag about 220 new miles of WALL, because he likes to say a bunch of WALL has been built, even though that is a big lie. (Trump has built three miles of new WALL.) According to the Arizona Department of Health Services, Yuma County, which is small, has 4,739 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

Maricopa County, where Phoenix is, and where Trump went next, has 33,883 confirmed cases. Yesterday, the day of Trump's visit, the state reported a record number of new cases, 3,591, and also a record number of hospitalizations. Arizona's positivity rate for testing is in the 20 percent neighborhood. According to the very Republican governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey, the bulk of these new cases are young people in the 20-44 age group.

NBC News spoke to a man on the ground:  

"Each day I've been going into work over the last month is worse, and what I mean by worse is ... just overwhelmed with COVID patients," said Dr. Frank LoVecchio, who works in several Arizona hospitals in emergency medicine and public health.

Another doctor said he'd seen the biggest jump in hospitalizations particularly in the last week or so.

Meanwhile, inside the Dream City Church, it was three-thousand sweaty gross Trump people wearing hardly any masks, which adds up to almost 10,000 sweaty gross armpits (some Trump supporters have three armpits, look it up in a science book) and God knows how much coronavirus passing from mouth to mouth to nose to mouth. (There were no temperature checks either, and clearly no social distancing.)

And they shouted "kung flu!" excitedly at each other as Trump ticked off his list of names for the novel coronavirus, because at Trump rallies, everybody yells racism together, it's a whole thing, because they're all garbage:

#PresidentTrump speaks in front of supporters @dreamcitychurch in #PhoenixTrumpRally @realDonaldTrump’s rally this… https: //t.co/IEc8v0M5J5

— Nick Oza (@Nick Oza) 1592953902.0 

When Trump drew out the tension by offering "Coronavirus" as the next name in his list, one excited voice after another shouted from the crowd: "Kung Flu!" "Kung Flu!" "Kung Flu!"

The president completed the call-and-response by saying, "Kung Flu, yeah," and was met with frenzied applause. [Nick] Oza's footage shows that several young men leaped to their feet, pumping their fists in the air in exultation, apparently thrilled to see their hero transgress all bounds of common decency right in front of them.

As we said, they're all garbage.

The Intercept reports that elsewhere in the rally, Trump got confused about what the "19" in "COVID-19" is about. (It's the year the virus started, why do we have to type this?)

If you want to read a full write-up of the rally, Politico did a pretty good job. If you don't want to do that, then fuck Politico.

Meanwhile, in the winning campaign, Joe Biden and Barack Obama threw a virtual event last night for 120,000 donors who actually showed up. They raised $11 million, from over 175,000 total donors. So that's cool.

[ CBS News / NBC News / The Intercept ]

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