New daily coronavirus infections are surging in the US, with more than 47,000 new cases confirmed yesterday marking an increase of more than 80 percent over the new cases reported in a single day just two weeks ago.
Steep national increases in cases are driven by a handful of states, eight of which hit record-high new cases Tuesday. Those states are Alaska, Arizona, California, Georgia, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas.
Nearly 2,637,000 Americans have now caught coronavirus and 127,427 people have died of the viral infection.
New York City reversed course today and decided not to let its restaurants resume indoor service next week as originally planned.
Miami Beach said that it would reinstate a nightly curfew beginning Thursday at 12:30 a.m., extending until 5 a.m., to try to curb the spread.
And California shut down bars and halted indoor dining at restaurants in 19 counties that are home to more than 70 percent of the state’s population.
Hopes that a spring that was largely lost to the virus would give way to a far freer summer are beginning to wane in many parts of the country.
Many states and localities are pausing and even reversing their plans to ease restrictions as the United States records more new cases each day than ever, new outbreaks are disrupting large states in the South and West, and areas that had made progress against the virus show worrying signs of resurgence.
Several Republican-led states that moved quickly to reopen this spring at the urging of Trump have seen new cases explode, and are now reimposing some restrictions.
Arizona, which Trump visited in May and praised its reopening plans, is now seeing record numbers of new cases, and Gov. Doug Ducey decided this week to close its water parks amid the July heat and to order bars, gyms and movie theaters in the state to close for 30 days.
Today, Vice President Mike Pence visited the state to discuss the crisis as the state reported more than 4,700 cases, just under its single-day record set a day earlier.
Pence told Ducey that the federal government would help the state with a request for 500 additional public health personnel by mobilizing doctors, nurses and technical personnel, and urged Arizonans to wear a mask “when indicated by state and local authorities or when social distancing is not possible.”
Ducey told Arizonans: “You are safer at home. We want to slow the spread of this virus and protect the most vulnerable. If we commit to that and we do it with increased intensity over the next several weeks, we will be in a different position.”
Texas, seeing more young people fall ill as they report record numbers of new cases, ordered its bars closed last week, and Florida banned drinking indoors in bars.
Jackson Memorial, Miami’s biggest public hospital, announced that beginning on Monday, it would stop elective surgeries except for those deemed urgent, in order to cope with its Covid-19 caseload, which has doubled over the past two weeks.
“If the trends continue the way we are, we will be inundated,” Carlos Migoya, the hospital’s president and chief executive, told the Miami-Dade County Commission.
More than 2,000 new cases were identified in Louisiana today, the most in a single day since early April, when there was a major outbreak in the New Orleans area.
“The situation isn’t as rosy as we’d like it to be,” Gov. John Bel Edwards said today, as he announced plans to step up enforcement of existing restrictions and urged the public not to patronize businesses that are not following the state’s rules. “We don’t want to close more business and so forth if we can avoid it,” he said.
In Washington, the House agreed today to extend for five weeks a pandemic relief loan program for small businesses, sending the legislation to President Trump.
Trump said today that he believed the virus was “going to sort of just disappear,” even as cases are rapidly rising nationwide — and added that he was “all for masks,” even though he has rarely worn one himself, mocked people who do, and has questioned the benefits and even the political meaning of face coverings.
“I think we’re going to be very good with the coronavirus. I think that at some point, that’s going to sort of just disappear, I hope,” Trump said in an interview with the Fox Business Network.
It is a claim he has made before.
On Feb. 27, when there were still few known cases in the United States, he said at a White House meeting: “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” There are now more than 2.6 million known cases in the nation, and there have been more than 127,000 deaths.
Today Trump said, “I think we’re going to have a vaccine very soon, too.”
Trump has made mistakenly hopeful predictions about the virus’s demise since the first confirmed cases appeared in March in the United States.
He has also repeatedly suggested that a vaccine might be imminent, even though top health officials say that one will almost certainly not be widely available to the public before 2021.
Top US infectious disease specialist Dr Anthony Fauci warned during a Tuesday Senate hearing that daily infections could soar to 100,000 ‘if this does not turn around’ and, while he declined to predict a specific number of fatalities, he worries the death toll in the US could reach ‘disturbing’ heights.
President Trump has attributed the surging daily case numbers to a ‘great’ expansion of coronavirus testing in the US.
The number of tests run Tuesday, June 30, was nearly double the number of tests run on May 30, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project.
But the number of daily cases has now far surpassed what was thought to be the pandemic’s peak, in April.
Public health experts warn that, although the number of people dying each day is down significantly, these increases typically lag behind case increases, with one recent study estimating a 17-day delay.