Virus surge as advice ignored
A SPIKE in US coronavirus infections has been fuelled in large part by people ignoring public health guidelines to keep their distance and wear masks, according to the US government’s top infectious disease official.
A daily surge in confirmed cases has been most pronounced in southern and western states that did not follow health officials’ recommendations to wait for a steady decline in infections for two weeks before reopening.
“That’s a recipe for disaster,” said Anthony Fauci, who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“Now we’re seeing the consequences of community spread, which is even more difficult to contain than spread in a well-known physical location like a prison or nursing home.”
More than 2.5 million people have tested positive for the coronavirus in the US and 125 000 have died.
The US tally is the highest in the world while the global death toll in the pandemic surpassed half a million people on Sunday.
California ordered some bars to close on Sunday, the first major backtrack on efforts to reopen the economy in the most populous US state. Texas and Florida ordered the closure of all their bars on Friday. Arizona and Georgia are among 15 states that had record increases in cases last week.
US Vice-President Mike Pence has pressed Americans to wear masks during a trip to Texas and wore one himself, a sharp turnaround for the administration. Republican President Donald Trump has refused to cover his face in public.
In places where cases are soaring health officials are also considering “completely blanketing these communities with tests”, Fauci said, to try to get a better sense of an outbreak.
They would either test groups or “pools” of people, or have community groups do contact tracing in person rather than by phone.
Fauci said he was optimistic that a vaccine could be available by the end of the year but that it was unclear how effective it would prove to be, adding that no vaccine would be 100% effective and citing challenges to achieve so-called herd immunity.
The top Republican in the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, yesterday stressed the importance of individual actions to stop the spread of the virus, deflecting criticism from Democrats and some health experts that Trump botched the prevention effort.
“You can’t say the federal government should do everything, and then say the federal government can’t tell the states what to do,” McCarthy said.
“The governors have a big responsibility here but every American has a responsibility. They should wear a mask.”