Two sides of DC: those threatened by Covid are unimpressed by Trump’s bravado

Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, has struggled to bring the US capital’s coronavirus infection rate down.

In July, she ordered the wearing of masks in crowded places outside, and the order has largely been obeyed: on Tuesday afternoon, more than nine in ten people walking around the city were wearing masks, and almost everyone in shops and cafes.

The rate of new infections has slowed down considerably since the summer, but the threat of a second wave is looming.

That is true in many American cities, but what makes Washington different is that a significant part of the threat comes from a single address, whose tenants have blatantly ignored the rules – and who have not even returned calls from Bowser’s office offering to help with contact tracing.

That address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: the White House, where more than a dozen workers have tested positive for Covid-19 in recent days, including the chief executive. That is compared to 28 new cases recorded on Tuesday across the whole city of over 700,000 people.

“We have reached out to the White House on a couple of different levels: a political level and a public health level,” Bowser said. A city health official managed to get through by telephone, the mayor added, but only “had a very cursory conversation that we don’t consider a substantial contact from the public health side”.

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Worse still, Donald Trump, unbowed by his hospitalisation for the disease stood on the White House balcony on Monday night and dramatically stripped off his mask, even while close to official photographers. On Twitter, he told Americans, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life,” ignoring the 210,000 Americans who have died, including 631 in Washington.

Pennsylvania Avenue slashes from the top left to the bottom right of the map of downtown DC: from the extreme wealth of the mostly white north-west where the White House and its attendant lobbyists are, to the low income overwhelmingly black south-east.

The south-east version of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a nondescript apartment block at the very edge of the city, just before it peters out into the poorer suburbs across the Anacostia river.

Orlando Pickens was sitting on a bus stop nearby, waiting for a ride home to Anacostia. Five people in his immediate family have died from coronavirus, and he was unimpressed by Trump’s bravado in the face of the disease.

“He’s talking about people they don’t got to be catching buses. They don’t have to go to CVS [pharmacy],” he said.

As for the threat posed by the White House Covid hotspot, Pickens was not too worried. “None of them are coming out to Anacostia,” he observed.

That sense of security was not shared a few blocks along the three-lane avenue in the direction of Congress, which stands as its pivot point between north-west and south-east.

The Eastern Market neighbourhood is a traditionally black area of Washington that has become increasingly mixed, attracting white residents for its lower house prices and proximity to the city’s political hub.

A growing number of restaurants and bars had clustered around the Metro station. Their buzz has been dimmed by the pandemic but their outside tables on cool fall evenings are still popular with political staffers from Congress and the administration, leading to fears that infection might be spread by White House employees to a far less advantaged community.

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On Saturday, when Trump was spending his first full day in Walter Reed hospital, about a hundred residents gathered outside the Eastern Market Metro station to protest against the White House’s indifference to public health precautions, and the immediate danger it posed to Washingtonians.

Rick, a city sanitation worker (who declined to give his last name), witnessed the protest.

“They were saying that people coming out of the White House, the staff and security, they should keep it down there,” he said pointing to the north-west. “It’s a hotspot. They didn’t want them out here. They wanted them to stay in there.”

Yolande Long, a human resources consultant who works in Eastern Market, agreed that the idea of White House staffers coming to relax in the district was a source of worry.

“It can actually have a devastating effect. A ripple effect,” Long said. But she added she was far more concerned about the message being sent nationwide from the White House balcony.

“Him saying he understands everything now about Covid has far-reaching effects on the American public because of the fool that we have living and working there and being the most powerful man in the United States and in the world,” she said.

One of Long’s colleagues is currently hospitalised with Covid, and she was unimpressed by Trump’s tweeted claim that the US has now developed “some really great drugs and knowledge” that had led to his apparent recovery.

“The problem is, he’s the only person that right now will have access to those drugs,” Long said. “If I, all of a sudden, came down with Covid. I wouldn’t be treated like he was.”

Jeffrey Jackson, who sells incense and perfumes on the street at the corner of Pennsylvania and 8th Street, said he would hope his hospital bills would be paid by publicly-funded Medicaid if he fell ill.

“The average person who’s living in poverty, they pretty much got Medicaid, or Medicare, but that may change,” said Jackson, who added that the economic impact from the pandemic might bring him down first.

Around his shoulder he wore a bandolier with vials of scents in place of bullets. It used to sell well, but with far less foot traffic, sales were a fifth of pre-Covid normal.

“Trump is a businessman but he’s not a leader of people,” Jackson said. “He’s doing things that no other president would do. He’s not being responsible. He’s doing things contrary to what experts say. It’s crazy.”