Why US schools can’t follow the example of Germany and Denmark, in charts

Editor’s Note: This was excerpted from the July 9 edition of CNN’s Meanwhile in America, the daily email about US politics for global readers. Click here to read past editions and subscribe.

Like we’ve said before, the first day of school can’t come soon enough for Trump.

On Wednesday, the US President threatened to withhold funding from schools that don’t open, and slammed safety guidelines by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as excessive. The agency shortly thereafter said it would introduce new guidelines.

Venting on Twitter, Trump pointed at Germany and several Scandinavian countries as places where schools “ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS.” Who’s going to tell him that the US is nothing like most of those countries (except perhaps Sweden)?

Meanwhile producer Shelby Rose lays out the data below.

Visiting Washington

Hopefully the multiple commercial flights, stopover in Atlanta and any lost baggage were worth it. On his first international trip as President, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador visited Washington to discuss the new North American trade deal. Neither Trump nor López Obrador wore a mask as they met Wednesday – Trump thinks the coverings are unflattering and López Obrador has joked that folk medicine amulets are enough to protect him from Covid-19.

‘STOP GETTING TESTED!’

Trump’s complaints about coronavirus testing – which he blames for revealing more cases – are having a trickle-down effect. After Ohio announced mandatory mask orders in some counties, a local Republican politician called for people to stop getting tested. “Are you tired of living in a dictatorship yet?” state Rep. Nino Vitale wrote on Facebook. “This is what happens when people go crazy and get tested. STOP GETTING TESTED! It is giving the government an excuse to claim something is happening that is not happening at the magnitude they say it is happening.”