Confidence in U.S. efforts falling: poll

As of Sunday noon, Beijing had collected 8.29 million patient samples for testing and completed 7.69 million tests, Zhang Qiang, an official from Beijing’s municipal committee, told a press conference.

“This means we have already tested all the people that need to be tested. We are also rolling out large scale screening to key regions and key populations (of the city) and improve our capability of testing,” said Zhang, adding that Beijing was also receiving medical support from other provinces.

Beijing reported its first case from the outbreak at Xinfadi market on June 11 and 311 people in the city of over 20 million have tested positive for the virus since then.

Zhang added that Beijing’s daily testing capacity has increased to 458,000 per day.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Sunday reported 2,504,175 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 44,703 cases from its previous count, and said the number of deaths had risen by 508 to 125,484.

The surge is likely to continue for weeks after states moved too soon to reopen their economies, two of the country’s leading public health experts said Sunday.

The warnings by Tom Frieden, director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, and Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, came as a new poll showed confidence in how the U.S. is dealing with COVID-19 has fallen. In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Frieden said the virus continued to have the “upper hand,” even as he acknowledged Americans had become tired of the restrictions needed to contain it.

“We are moving too fast,” Frieden said of states that remained eager to continue phased reopenings as cases continue to rise. “It’s like leaning into a left hook. You are going to get hit hard. And that’s what is happening.”

U.S. coronavirus cases now exceed 2.5 million, with over 125,000 reported fatalities — in both cases the world’s highest. The country’s inability to control the spread of the virus seems likely to result in U.S. citizens being banned from travelling to Europe, for example, where cases are down in some cases 90 per cent from their peak.

A move by the EU to restrict travel from the U.S. was the inevitable result of the continuing spread in America, Gottlieb said. Growing restrictions on travel within the U.S. could come next, he said.

As of late-afternoon on Sunday, there were 103,250 confirmed cases in Canada, with 8,522 deaths. That’s up from 102,959, with 8,516 deaths, at about the same time on Saturday.