Joe Biden’s coronavirus adviser said there was no nationwide wholesale lockdown plan
Washington:
Chief coronavirus adviser to President-elect Joe Biden said on Friday there were no plans to wholesale nationwide lockdown to curb the coronavirus outbreak, with three states on the west coast of the United States having jointly called for the cessation of non-essential travel.
The joint advice from California, Oregon and Washington, urging residents to avoid venturing out of state, came as health experts feared the upcoming holiday season could accelerate already alarming spikes in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations.
Oregon Governor Kate Brown took the additional decision to order social gatherings limited to no more than six people, effective immediately, a restriction she said she was prepared to enforce.
“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, to stop your social gatherings … and house parties and limit your social interactions to six and under, no more than one household,” Brown said. .
The increasingly dire situation has prompted a growing list of state and local governments to reimpose restrictions they have relaxed during a summer ebb of COVID-19 outbreaks.
Governors of six northeastern states, the region hardest hit in the first months of the pandemic, are planning an emergency meeting this weekend to coordinate responses, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said .
The country’s patchwork of measures will likely remain intact after Biden’s inauguration on Jan.20 following his electoral defeat of Republican President Donald Trump, the head of the Democratic Coronavirus Advisory Board said.
“We’re not in a place where we’re saying shut down the whole country,” Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former US surgeon general, told ABC’s “Good Morning America”.
“Right now the way we should think about it is more like a series of restrictions that we increase or decrease depending on the severity of a spread in a specific region,” he said.
Murthy’s comments were a categorical rebuttal of Trump’s repeated campaign claims that Biden intended to lock down the country if elected president.
Medical experts are reporting an increase in indoor gatherings with the onset of winter, along with gaps in social distancing and mask-wearing habits, as the main factors causing a worrying increase in coronavirus transmissions to nationwide and the rate of COVID-19 tests coming back positive.
The growing workload is starting to deplete the resources of some hospitals and is on track to push many to the brink, they warn.
“I am 100% worried about the holidays,” Dr. Khalilah Gates, a pulmonologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, told Reuters on Friday. “We don’t have an infinite capacity to surge.”
Disturbing benchmarks
Announcing the west coast travel advisory, California Health and Human Services Secretary Dr Mark Ghaly said a strict warrant had been ruled out amid fears ‘COVID fatigue’ could trigger a negative reaction, leading people to behave less safely.
The advisory urges people entering or returning to the three states to self-quarantine for 14 days, the virus’s suspected incubation period.
California on Thursday became just the second state, after Texas earlier this month, to see its number of confirmed infections to date surpass one million, with its daily average of new cases jumping nearly 50% in the past. during the first week of November.
“This is the fastest rate of growth we’ve seen in California,” said Dr. Erica Pan, state health officer and chief epidemiologist.
Illinois reported a record 15,433 new cases on Friday, the most of any state in a 24-hour period, surpassing the previous record of 15,300 new cases set by Florida in July.
The United States has documented more than 100,000 new cases of COVID-19 per day for the past nine consecutive days, while recording an average of more than 1,000 deaths per day for the past six consecutive days, a trend observed for the last times in August.
The daily workload has more than doubled in 13 states in the past two weeks, most of them in the Midwest, according to a Reuters tally of figures from US public health agencies.
Dr. Robert Kim-Farley, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, attributed some of the spikes to recent Halloween celebrations. He warned that more to come if Americans ignore advice to avoid traveling and gathering for Thanksgiving in late November and Christmas.
Chicago urged residents to stay home and avoid visitors for the next 30 days, including Thanksgiving.
In New York City, restaurants have been banned from dining indoors at 10 p.m., while Detroit public schools have suspended in-person learning from Friday.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease expert on Trump’s coronavirus task force, said he had not had any contact with Biden’s transition team, but his advice would be to continue to take social distances, avoiding crowds, wearing masks and washing hands.
“The principles of public health do not change from month to month or from administration to administration,” he said in an interview.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
