Warning: ‘We’re risking a backslide’
Doctors foresee danger as states ease rules
WASHINGTON — With about half of the states easing their shutdowns to get their economies restarted and cellphone data showing that people are becoming restless and increasingly leaving home, public health authorities are worried.
“We’re risking a backslide that will be intolerable,” said Dr. Ian Lipkin of Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity.
Many states have not put in place the robust testing that experts believe is necessary to detect and contain new outbreaks. And many governors have pressed ahead before their states met one of the key benchmarks in the Trump administration’s guidelines for reopening: a 14-day downward trajectory in new illnesses and infections.
“If we relax these measures without having the proper public health safeguards in place, we can expect many more cases and, unfortunately, more deaths,” said Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy with the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington.
Cases have continued to rise steadily in places such as Iowa and Missouri since the governors began reopening, while new infections have yo-yoed in Georgia, Tennessee and Texas.
Lipkin said he is most worried about two things: the reopening of bars, where people crowd together and lose their inhibitions, and large gatherings such as sporting events, concerts and plays. Preventing outbreaks will require aggressive contact tracing powered by armies of public health workers hundreds of thousands of people strong, which the U.S. doesn’t yet have, Lipkin said.
In other developments:
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said nearly 5,000 coronavirus illnesses and at least 88 deaths have been reported among inmates in American jails and prisons. An additional 2,800 cases and 15 deaths were reported among guards and other staffer members.
Millions of protective masks that were to arrive in California this week as part of the state’s nearly $1 billion deal with a Chinese company have been delayed, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Wednesday.
The governor said the N95 masks made by BYD, an electric vehicle manufacturer with a California manufacturing plant, were stalled in the federal certification process. He did not explain further.
The great majority of people newly hospitalized with the coronavirus in New York are either retired or unemployed and were avoiding public transit, according to a new state survey, the first such look at people still getting seriously ill despite six weeks of severe social distancing.
The survey of 1,269 patients admitted to 113 hospitals over three recent days confounded expectations that new cases would be dominated by essential workers, especially those regularly traveling on subways and buses.
Retirees accounted for 37 percent of the people hospitalized. Another 46 percent were unemployed. Only 17 percent were working.
Only 4 percent were still using public transportation in their daily life, the survey found.
More than 60 percent of coronavirus deaths in Washington are linked to long-term-care facilities and authorities say more than 250 such locations in the state have reported at least one COVID-19 case.
The state’s COVID-19 response team released information Wednesday showing there were 507 deaths tied to such facilities as of last Saturday, accounting for 61 percent of virus fatalities in the state at the time. There were 2,894 positive cases associated with care facilities, representing 19 percent of total cases as of last week.
The nation’s first deadly cluster of COVID-19 cases happened at a Seattle-area care facility, where more than 40 people died.