Daily US Times: If you turn off the sound while watching a campaign speech in the Senate runoff races in Georgia, ignore the hats and signs, you can still tell which party it’s for by the faces in the audience. If they have not masks on, it’s most likely a Republican event. If they have masks on, it’s almost certainly a Democratic one.
The US recorded more than 150,000 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic took hold nationwide about nine months ago, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention data shows.
Public health experts are urging people to practice wearing masks and social distancing outside their homes.
But, taking their cue from President Donald Trump, Republican supporters by and large have disdained those warnings. On Friday, that was conspicuously on display in Georgia, when Democrat Jon Ossoff held an outdoor drive-in rally in a parking lot in Augusta where nearly all attendees wore face coverings. But in another part of the state, Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both running for reelection, held a joint rally in a restaurant where hardly anyone in the standing-room-only crowd wore facemasks.
Ossoff finished behind Perdue in the November 3 election and will face him in a runoff on January 5. Loeffler will be running at the same time against Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock.
Ossoff has made the response by many Republicans to the Covid-19 pandemic an issue in his campaign.
Ossoff told Yahoo News: “Throughout this entire crisis, [Perdue and Loeffler] have downplayed the risks [of COVID-19].”
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