Pandemic eases across Sun Belt but could heat up again
The torrid coronavirus summer across the Sun Belt is easing after two disastrous months that brought more than 35,000 deaths. Whether the outbreak will heat up again after Labor Day and the resumption of school and football remains to be seen.
Seven of the nine states along the nation’s Southern and Western rim are seeing drops in three important gauges — new deaths, new cases and the percentage of tests coming back positive for the virus. Alabama is the only state in the region to see all three numbers rising; Mississippi’s deaths are up, but positive rates and cases are dropping.
In Florida, reported deaths from COVID- 19 are running at about 114 per day on average, down from a peak of 185 in early August.
The U. S. leads the world in both coronavirus deaths and confirmed infections after a spring outbreak centered around New York, followed by the flareup across the Sun Belt over the summer.
As of Tuesday, there were more than 25.3 million confirmed cases and over 850,000 deaths worldwide, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University, with the U. S. accounting for more than 6 million infections and 183,000 of the dead.
About 68,000 of the U. S. deaths have come since the start of summer, with the number of infections in the country nearly tripling in the same period.
“It’s been a summer of fire, not ice,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectiousdisease expert at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “If anything, we’ve learned that this virus is even nastier than we thought it was in the spring.”
Americans are now heading into Labor Day weekend, the unofficial end of summer, knowing the threat isn’t gone as fall brings a return to school and sports.
“We’ll be struggling with COVID. I don’t know whether it will surge in the winter, but it certainly will stick around,” Dr. Shaffner said.
Health experts pinned some of the blame for the summertime surge on Memorial Day and Fourth of July gatherings, and now they worry Labor Day will contribute to the virus’s spread.