Experts: Reopening toll weeks off
Virus’s unpredictability leaves spike, fall estimates murky
States are beginning to restart their economies after months of paralyzing coronavirus lockdowns, but it could take weeks until it becomes clear whether those reopenings will cause a spike in covid-19 cases, experts said Wednesday.
The outbreak’s trajectory varies wildly across the country, with steep increases in cases in some places, decreases in others and infection rates that can shift dramatically from neighborhood to neighborhood.
“Part of the challenge is although we are focused on the top-line national numbers in terms of our attention, what we are seeing is 50 different curves and 50 different stories playing out,” said Thomas Tsai, assistant professor at the Harvard Global Health Institute. “And what we have seen about covid-19 is that the story and the effect is often very local.”
A handful of states started easing their lockdowns about
two weeks ago, ranging from shopping malls in Texas to beach hotels in South Carolina to gyms in Wyoming. Georgia was one of the first states where some businesses were allowed to open their doors again, starting April 24 with barbershops, hair salons, gyms, bowling alleys and tattoo parlors.
But it may be five to six weeks from then before the effects are known, said Crystal Watson of Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
“As we saw early in the year, epidemics of covid-19 start slow and take some time to build and become evident,” Watson said in an email.
The outbreak’s trajectory can vary greatly around the country, according to an Associated Press analysis of confirmed cases. For instance, steep increases in daily new cases are occurring in Hennepin County in Minnesota, and Fairfax County in Virginia, while in others, such as Bergen County, N.J., and Wayne County, Mich., there’s been a steady decline.
The AP analyzed case counts compiled by Johns Hopkins University, using a rolling seven-day average to account for day-to-day variability in test reporting.
HERE TO STAY
In Geneva, meanwhile, a top World Health Organization official warned that it’s possible the coronavirus is here to stay.
“This virus may never go away,” Dr. Michael Ryan said at a news briefing. Without a vaccine, he said it could take years for the global population to build up sufficient levels of immunity.
“I think it’s important to put this on the table,” he said. “This virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities,” like other previously novel diseases such as HIV, which have never disappeared, but for which effective treatments have been developed.
It can take three to five days for someone newly infected with the coronavirus to feel sick, and some infected people won’t have symptoms at all. Since testing is mostly reserved in the U.S. for those with symptoms, it can take two weeks or so — the time for one group of people to spread the virus to another — to have enough testing data to reflect a surge in cases.
“If you are doing adequate testing, it will take two to three weeks” to spot an increase, Dr. Ashish Jha, director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute, said Wednesday as he prepared to speak to a congressional subcommittee on the crisis.
He urged a dramatic increase in testing.
“It was the failure of testing that caused our country to shut down,” Jha said. “We need federal leadership on the level of testing, guidance on whom to test and federal help on the sheer capacity, the number of tests that can be done. We still do not have the testing capacity we need to open up safely.”
AROUND THE WORLD
New coronavirus clusters have surfaced around the world as nations struggle to balance restarting their economies and preventing a second wave of infections.
The reemergence of coronavirus cases in many parts
of Asia is prompting a return to closures in places that had claimed success in battling the disease or appeared to have eradicated it altogether, including South Korea, regarded as one of the continent’s top success stories.
South Korea last week rescinded a go-ahead for bars and clubs to reopen after a spike in cases, hours after officials announced the lifting of previous social distancing restrictions and the start of a “new everyday life with the coronavirus.”
South Korean President Moon Jae-in warned his country Sunday to “brace for the pandemic’s second wave,” calling the battle against covid-19 a “prolonged” war.
Chancellor Angela Merkel urged Germans to be “courageous and vigilant” Wednesday as the country emerges from its shutdown, calling on them to avoid a relapse into tougher restrictions even as officials set out plans to relax border controls.
Germany started loosening restrictions on April 20, about a month after they were introduced. The easing has gathered pace in the past week, with the country’s 16 state governments gradually opening restaurants, schools, gyms and other facilities. Social distancing rules remain in place.
Some German regions have been less patient than others, and Merkel has consistently advocated caution. On Wednesday, she said she sees “an obligation not to endanger what we have achieved.”
“It would be depressing if, because we want too much too quickly, we had to return to restrictions that we all want to leave behind,” Merkel said in a question-and-answer session in parliament.
Earlier Wednesday, Merkel’s government set out plans to loosen the border controls that Germany introduced in mid-March.
Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said checks on the border with Luxembourg will be dropped Saturday. Germany also is prepared to end checks on the Danish border, but Copenhagen is still consulting with other neighbors.
On Germany’s borders with France, Switzerland and Austria, all border crossings will be opened, rather than selected ones at present, and authorities will switch to spot checks rather than systematic checks.
LIFTING LIMITS
Some countries are going ahead with plans to lift restrictions. India and Russia eased their restrictions Tuesday even as the number of infections in both countries continued to soar. France experienced a spike Monday, the same day that the country eased its lockdowns, with 263 new cases reported, compared with 70 the previous day.
Iran, the epicenter of the disease in the Middle East, with more than 110,000 reported cases, has ordered a county in the southwestern province of Khuzestan to reimpose a lockdown after cases spiked there. But the government is still planning to proceed with the reopening of schools later this week.
In Lebanon, authorities reinstated a nationwide lockdown for four days beginning Wednesday night after a spike in reported infections and complaints that social distancing rules were being ignored.
Lebanese rushed to food stores to stock up on vegetables and basic items, hours before the new nationwide lockdown was reinstated.
Mexico’s government says it will lift a quarantine for hundreds of counties starting Monday and will begin to gradually reopen the rest of the nation on June 1.
The country has been on a nationwide lockdown for more than seven weeks, and businesses are eager to reopen. Analysts are predicting that the economy could shrink up to 10% this year — one of the most significant recessions in Latin America.
“We’ve begun a new stage. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said at a news conference Wednesday.
The tension in balancing people’s safety against severe economic fallout is playing out across the world. Italy partially lifted lockdown restrictions last week only to see a big jump in confirmed coronavirus cases in its hardest-hit region.
Pakistan reported 2,000 new infections in a single day after people crowded markets as restrictions were eased.
BLUNT WARNING
In the United States, the country’s top infectious-disease expert issued a blunt warning Tuesday that cities and states could see more covid-19 deaths and economic damage if they lift stay-athome orders too quickly.
“There is a real risk that you will trigger an outbreak that you may not be able to control,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said in Senate testimony.
Fauci testified from his home via video, but will rejoin White House meetings, ending a period of isolation after Vice President Mike Pence’s spokeswoman, Katie Miller, tested positive last week for coronavirus.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn will also participate in meetings after self-isolating.
“Providing that they are asymptomatic, screened and monitored for fever and other symptoms, wear a face covering, and maintain a distance of at least six feet from others, Drs. Redfield, Hahn, and Fauci can and will participate in meetings on the White House complex when their attendance is needed,” the joint statement from the CDC, FDA, and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said, adding that the three are considered essential workers.
Pence has declined to be in the same room as President Donald Trump since Pence’s press secretary, Katie Miller, tested positive for the coronavirus. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Tuesday that the measure was Pence’s decision, and it will be up to him when to end it.
Also in Washington, Trump called on governors across the nation Wednesday to work to reopen schools that were closed because of the coronavirus, taking issue with Fauci’s caution against moving too quickly in sending students back to class.
The president accused Fauci of wanting “to play all sides of the equation.”
“I think they should open the schools, absolutely. I think they should,” Trump told reporters at the White House, echoing comments he had made in a television interview. “Our country’s got to get back, and it’s got to get back as soon as possible. And I don’t consider our country coming back if the schools are closed.”
Fauci had urged caution in testimony before a Senate committee Tuesday, although he made clear that he believes reopening decisions will likely differ from one region to the next.
At one point, he told members that “the idea of having treatments available or a vaccine to facilitate the reentry of students into the fall term would be something that would be a bit of a bridge too far.”
Fauci later clarified that he was not implying that students should be barred from returning to class until a covid-19 vaccine is developed.
“To me, it’s not an acceptable answer,” Trump said of Fauci on Wednesday. He said the coronavirus has “had very little impact on young people,” although there is growing concern over cases of a mysterious inflammatory syndrome in young people that is thought to be related to the virus.
ORDER STRUCK
Meanwhile, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck down Gov. Tony Evers’ coronavirus stay-at-home order Wednesday, ruling that his administration overstepped its authority when it extended the mandate for another month without consulting legislators.
The 4-3 ruling essentially reopens the state, lifting caps on the size of gatherings, allowing people to travel as they please and allowing shuttered businesses to reopen, including bars and restaurants. Local governments can still impose their own health restrictions, however. Dane County officials issued an order minutes after the ruling came down imposing a mandate identical to now-invalidated state stayat-home order.
Evers issued a stay-athome order in March that closed schools and nonessential businesses. The closures battered the state economy, but Evers argued that they were necessary to slow the virus’ spread. The order was supposed to lift April 24, but Health and Human Services Secretary Andrea Palm, an Evers appointee, extended it to May 26.
The U.S. has the largest coronavirus outbreak in the world by far: 1.39 million infections and more than 84,000 deaths, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Worldwide, the virus has infected more than 4.3 million people and killed some 296,000, according to the Johns Hopkins tally. Experts say the actual numbers are likely far higher.
Information for this article was contributed by Carla K. Johnson, Michelle R. Smith, Tim Sullivan, Nicky Forster, Kevin Freking, Jill Colvin, Jim Anderson, James MacPherson, Todd Richmond, Sarah El Deeb, Zeina Karam, Jon Gambrell, Mohammad Nasiri, Mohsen Ganji and Samya Kullab of The Associated Press; by Liz Sly, Loveday Morris, Min Joo Kim, Gerry Shih, Suzan Haidamous and Mary Beth Sheridan of The Washington Post; and by Josh Wingrove of Bloomberg News.