THE CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE:
President Trump
Mismanagement has cost lives
Putting transit workers’ lives at risk
For transit workers, Trump’s dismal mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis has cost hundreds of lives. A recent ATU survey found that 50% of employers have not provided bus operators with basic personal protective equipment (PPE) like masks and gloves. Without federal government help, transit agencies have been forced to bid against each other for PPE, and as a result, securing the lifesaving equipment has been difficult. Trump has said that the federal government is not a “shipping clerk.” It’s every state and every transit agency for themselves.
On February 26, President Donald Trump boasted that the coronavirus was about to disappear altogether from the United States: “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero,” he said. The next day, at a White House meeting, he said, “It’s going to disappear. One day – it’s like a miracle – it will disappear.”
Over 50 ATU members dead That was Trump’s plan to deal with COVID-19. He had none. As this issue of In Transit goes to print, more than 120,000 Americans, including over 50 ATU members, have died from the coronavirus. Over 2 million Americans have been infected, including more than 1,000 ATU members. Since the pandemic began, the president has advised Americans to inject themselves with disinfectants like bleach or isopropyl alcohol, and encouraged people to take hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug the Food and Drug Administration warns could cause serious heart problems for coronavirus patients.
Defying all common sense, in the first few critical weeks of the pandemic, Trump’s Department of Transportation remarkably said on its website that that “…PPE is not recommended at this time…” Even now, after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., buses and rail cars) especially in areas of significant communitybased transmission, Trump’s DOT has not mandated masks on transit vehicles. As a result, passengers with coronavirus keep getting on the bus, infecting other passengers and transit workers. That’s IN TRANSIT
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