Editor:

You would think President Trump has no plan to win the war against COVID-19?

New daily cases are now approaching 70,000, with daily deaths trending higher, too ("Crossroads," July 9).

In many places, hospital intensive care units (ICUs) are at full capacity with COVID-19 patients making it more difficult to give them the proper care they need.

An appropriate presidential response would be cautionary words and a plan to decrease the current spread. But instead, Trump minimizes caution, saying that 99 percent of COVID-19 cases are totally harmless. Apparently he equates "harmless" with "non-fatal" discounting the fact that ICU patients can suffer for days or weeks, and often long thereafter.

And for a plan, it appears the administration's approach is to convince Americans to learn to just "live with it." Trump's edict that "schools must open in the fall" reinforces this.

I think Trump's strategy of "learning to live with it" is just waving a white flag, conceding today's battle to COVID-19 so he can win the war with an effective vaccine tomorrow. Let's hope such a vaccine arrives sooner rather than later or today's inaction could result in a pyrrhic victory with significantly more deaths than taking some additional action might have allowed.

Sherman Schapiro, Eureka