Face covers urged for yelling, singing

CDC offers guidance as protesting persists, campaign rallying gears up

Federal health officials on Friday urged organizers of large gatherings that involve shouting, chanting or singing to “strongly encourage” attendees to use cloth face coverings to reduce the risk of spreading the coronavirus.

The guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention comes after more than a week of national protests against police brutality where many attendees and police did not wear masks. It also coincides with President Donald Trump’s plans to hit the campaign trail next week and to accept his party’s nomination in Jacksonville, Fla., later this summer. The Republican National Committee has indicated that it does not want to require participants to wear masks for the speech.

Jay Butler, the CDC’s deputy director of infectious diseases, sidestepped questions about whether the agency’s guidance about large gatherings applies to political rallies, saying the recommendations speak for themselves.

“They are not regulations. They are not commands,” said Butler, who is helping to lead the agency’s response. “But they are recommendations or even suggestions … how you can have a gathering that will keep people as safe as possible.”

A similar recommendation to use cloth face coverings in settings that involve shouting, chanting, or singing, including choirs, was removed from the agency’s guidance for reopening houses of worship two weeks ago after weeks of debate between the White House and the CDC.

Asked whether social-distancing measures would be in place for the Republican convention, Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry said in a television interview that his city is “on the full road to reopening.”

He added: “If circumstances change in the interest of public health, obviously the [the Republican National Committee], the president, myself, if there was an unexpected outbreak, health risk, hospitalization systems that couldn’t handle it, we would obviously adapt at that point in time. … We expect to have a convention that demonstrates that Jacksonville is open for business.”

At the CDC briefing — the agency’s first full-fledged one in more than three months — Director Robert Redfield acknowledged Americans are eager to return to normal activities. But it’s important for them to remember “this situation is unprecedented and that the pandemic has not ended,” he said.

Officials said the guidance released Friday is intended to help people stay as safe as possible as the country heads into the summer months and Americans seek to reconnect with family and friends.

Large in-person gatherings where it is difficult to stay 6 feet apart and where attendees travel from outside the local area pose the highest risk for infection, the guidance says. Gatherings mentioned in the guidance include concerts, festivals, conferences, parades, weddings and sporting events.

“We recognize that we’re all getting tired of staying at home and people long for the lives that they had back in December,” Butler said. The resources are aimed at helping people make decisions about how to resume some activities while continuing to follow many of the public-health recommendations to prevent transmission, he said.

RISK IS OUT THERE

Public-health officials have criticized the administration’s response for lacking clear and consistent communication about risks and for sidelining the CDC. The last CDC briefing was March 9.

“If the guidance isn’t clear from the top, from our political leaders and public-health leaders, people will be confused,” said Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“I am really concerned about some of the things that I hear about this virus being behind us or we aren’t planning on issuing any more directives or communicating about this,” he said. “I think it’s going to be really important from the top of government … to be communicating about risks.”

The CDC’s Butler said the number of new cases each day has been “relatively plateaued over a prolonged period of time” nationwide. But communities are experiencing different levels of transmission as they ease mitigation efforts, he said.

In coming weeks, states could see new case growth as they reopen and the number of mass gatherings also increases. He warned about “additional potential challenges” in the fall and winter when covid-19 and seasonal flu could be circulating together.

If cases start to increase dramatically, he said officials may need to reconsider the kinds of measures states used in March, such as stay-at-home orders. But he said those decisions should be made by local officials. He noted that many Americans remain at risk for infection because the vast majority still have not been exposed to the virus.

Public-health experts say they are seeing a “new wave” of states sliding into surges of cases, including Arizona, California, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. Many of those states lifted stay-at-home orders and business restrictions a few weeks ago.

On large gatherings, the guidance says event planners should consider several strategies, from broadcasting regular announcements about steps attendees could take to reduce the virus’s spread, to limiting attendance or seating capacity to allow for social distancing, to reconfiguring parking lots to limit congregation points.

It also suggests limiting attendance to people who live in the area and working with local officials to identify how to separate people with covidlike symptoms, or those who have tested positive for the virus but do not have symptoms.

Separately, officials laid out recommendations to help people reduce their own risk for infection as they resume daily activities. Besides urging people to continue taking precautions such as hand-washing, wearing face coverings, and keeping 6 feet from others, it made specific suggestions for certain activities, including:

■ Going to the bank — Use drive-thru services or ATMs;

■ Hosting a cookout — Encourage people to carry in their own food and drinks and identify one person to serve shareable items;

■ Traveling overnight — Consider taking the stairs at hotels, or wait to ride alone in the elevator or only with people from your household.

Officials also released a report showing Americans strongly supported stay-athome orders in early to midMay, with most adults reporting that they would not feel safe if those orders were lifted. Most also said they often or always wore face coverings.

SPIKE DOUBTED

At the White House, though, officials played down the severity of the virus surge and sought to blame it on factors beyond Trump’s push to reopen the economy.

“I spoke to our health experts at some length last evening. They’re saying there is no second spike. Let me repeat that: There is no second spike,” Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, said Friday on Fox & Friends.

He said coronavirus cases are increasing only in certain spots of the country, but that nationally, the rates of new cases and fatalities have flattened out. “There is no emergency,” Kudlow said. “There is no second wave. I don’t know where that got started on Wall Street.”

Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who stressed that the country has a positive testing rate under 6%, said the data on the virus shows the nation is moving in the right direction.

Still, Adams cautioned at a round-table discussion with Trump on Thursday in Dallas that while the country has flattened the curve on virus cases, “that doesn’t mean that covid has gone away, that it’s any less contagious, that it’s any less deadly to vulnerable communities.”

At the White House, the coronavirus task force has dramatically scaled back both its visibility and its operations. It now meets once or twice a week on an as-needed basis instead of every day.

White House officials say that, because response systems have already been put in place and a strategy developed, there’s no longer a need for a whole-of-government response. Still, the president receives regular briefings, and the vice president gets briefed several times a day.

RALLY LIABILITY WAIVER

Trump’s campaign is asking people attending his campaign rally in Oklahoma next week to waive liability if they contract the virus.

An online ticket form for the Trump campaign rally Friday at the BOK Center in Tulsa, tells potential participants that by attending, “you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to Covid-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.; BOK Center; ASM Global; or any of their affiliates, directors, officers, employees, agents, contractors, or volunteers liable for any illness or injury.”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican who greeted Trump upon his arrival Thursday in Dallas, has been among the most aggressive state leaders in easing coronavirus restrictions.

Virus cases in Texas rose 2.3% to 81,583, surpassing the seven-day average of 2.2%, according to state health department figures released Thursday. Deaths climbed 1.9% to 1,920, the biggest daily increase in a week.

Hospitalizations declined for the first time since June 6, dropping 6.7% to 2,008. That mark was hit a day after the in-patient tally surged to the highest since the pandemic began.

The president has been pressing ahead with travel plans. He will head to his golf resort in Bedminster, N.J., after leaving Texas. More rallies will follow the one in Tulsa, he has said.

The Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, said Trump was “returning to the campaign trail, trying to ignore reality.”

“While he may have forgotten about Covid-19, Covid-19 hasn’t forgotten about us. In more than 20 states, the level of new infections continues to rise,” Biden said Thursday night in a statement.

SURGE VS. ECONOMY

One by one, states are weighing the health risks from the virus against the economic damage from the stay-at-home orders that have thrown millions out of work over the past three months.

And many governors are coming down on the side of jobs, even though an Associated Press analysis this week found that cases are rising in nearly half the states — a trend experts attributed in part to the gradual reopening of businesses over the past few weeks.

Alabama, which began reopening in early May, has seen more than a quarter of the state’s 23,000 cases occur in the past two weeks as Republican Gov. Kay Ivey emphasized personal responsibility.

Arizona has become one of the most troubling hot spots in the U.S. as new cases have surged to more than 1,000 a day, up from fewer than 400 before stay-at-home orders expired in mid-May.

California, which implemented the country’s first statewide stay-at-home order, entered the most expansive phase of its gradual reopening Friday. Wineries, hotels, zoos, museums and aquariums were allowed to reopen. San Francisco restaurants resumed outdoor dining, and the San Diego Zoo opened on a limited basis.

So far, only a small number of governors have shown a willingness to retreat, or at least hit pause.

Republican Gov. Gary Herbert of Utah and Democratic Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon said they would halt lifting further restrictions for the time being as new cases flare.

“As I’ve said before, reopening comes with real risk,” Brown said in announcing a one-week pause that will affect, among other places, Portland, the state’s biggest city. Information for this article was contributed by Lena H. Sun and Chelsea Janes of The Washington

Post; by Jill Colvin, Zeke Miller, Paul J. Weber, Andrew Demillo, Andrew Selsky, Kimberly Chandler, Bob Christie and Tammy Webber of The Associated Press; and by John Harney of Bloomberg News.