RALEIGH – Governor Roy Cooper announced today that the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in North Carolina has risen to more than 4,800, with more than 300 people hospitalized in the state due to the illness.

Meanwhile, a flurry of news reports from the weekend shed new light on the Trump administration’s dramatic mismanagement of the crisis in its early days.

• In an interview with CNN on Sunday, Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that more robust mitigation efforts by the Trump administration would have saved more American lives:

“I mean, obviously, you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives.”

• New reporting from The New York Times made clear that President Trump “repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus” and instead focused on other issues:

“The president, though, was slow to absorb the scale of the risk and to act accordingly, focusing instead on controlling the message, protecting gains in the economy and batting away warnings from senior officials.” 

• According to the Associated Press, despite making a number of lofty promises “meant to reassure” the country, the President and his team “haven’t delivered on critical ones.”:

“But bold promises and florid assurances were made, day after day, from the White House and a zigzagging president who minimized the danger for months and systematically exaggerates what Washington is doing about it.”

• Noting that a full month has passed since President Trump declared a national emergency, NPR News reports that “few of the promises made that day have come to pass,” despite the administration’s public posturing:

“NPR’s Investigations Team dug into each of the claims made from the podium that day. And rather than a sweeping national campaign of screening, drive-through sample collection and lab testing, it found a smattering of small pilot projects and aborted efforts. In some cases, no action was taken at all.”

• A new feature story published in Rolling Stone cites a number of lawmakers and medical experts in suggesting that the administration, “through some combination of ignorance, arrogance, and incompetence, failed to heed the warnings of its own experts.”:

“Trump and his closest aides have ignored scientists, enlisted family members and TV personalities and corporate profiteers for help, and disregarded every protocol for how to communicate during a pandemic while spewing misinformation and lies.”