Coronavirus Cases Rising in Many States as Reopening Continues

With most state reopenings well underway, many are now seeing alarming surges in new coronavirus cases, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo warned that a return to lockdown for his state was possible.

“If we have a high number of violations of the [reopening] policy, which is tantamount to a high likelihood of the spread of the virus, and the local governments are not monitoring policing, doing the compliance, yes, there is a very real possibility that we would roll back the reopening in those areas. The only alternative would be to pause the entire reopening,” Cuomo said Sunday at a news conference.

According to CNN, 25,000 complaints have already been filed against businesses in Manhattan and elsewhere for violating the reopening plan. Violations included large gatherings, lack of social distancing and people going without masks.

Meanwhile, cases were rising in 18 states as of Saturday, with Oregon, Nevada, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Alabama and South Carolina recording a rise of over 50% in the past week as compared to the previous one, CNN noted.

Texas saw a record-high 2,200 people hospitalized with COVID-19 on Saturday, and North Carolina set its own record with 823 new hospitalizations the same day.

It’s not clear if all this marks a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “However, when you start to see increases in hospitalization, that’s a surefire situation that you’ve got to pay close attention to,” he said on Friday.

By Monday, the U.S. coronavirus case count had passed 2 million as the death toll topped 115,000.

Masks, lockdowns show benefit

A new British study released last week offers some hope: Scientists report that the widespread use of face masks — not more lockdowns — could slow the spread of the virus to tolerable levels, the Washington Post reported.

“Our analyses support the immediate and universal adoption of face masks by the public,” said study leader Richard Stutt, a Cambridge University professor, the newspaper reported.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A scientific journal, also suggest that lockdowns alone can’t fight the coronavirus if and when it spikes again.

A new study also showed that stay-at-home orders may also have been worth it, preventing nearly 60 million U.S. infections.

That report, published in the Nature medical journal, examined how different social distancing policies and measures might have limited the spread of COVID-19, the Post reported.

The University of California at Berkeley researchers examined six countries — China, the United States, France, Italy, Iran and South Korea — and estimated how more than 1,700 different interventions, such as stay-at-home orders, business closings and travel bans, altered the spread of the virus.

The report concluded that those six countries collectively managed to avert 62 million test-confirmed infections, which the researchers estimated would correspond to roughly 530 million total infections, the newspaper said.

School closures had no significant effect, although the authors said the issue requires further study, the Post reported.

Even as all states have now reopened, public health officials have raised concern about future coronavirus spread following days of protests against police brutality across the country. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Sunday it was closely monitoring the demonstrations and warned such gatherings could spur coronavirus transmission, CNN reported. Some states are already seeing upward trends in new cases.

The protests make it hard to follow social distancing guidelines and “may put others at risk,” CDC spokesperson Kristen Nordlund said in a statement, CNN reported.

Economic upswing

On Thursday, another weekly batch of new jobless claims suggested that the damage the pandemic has wrought on the U.S. economy may be slowing. Roughly 1.5 million people filed for state unemployment insurance. That’s a continued decline from the 6 million claims seen in a single week in March, The New York Times reported. More than 40 million claims have been filed since the coronavirus pandemic began.

“We’re slowly seeing the labor market recovery begin to take form,” said Robert Rosener, an economist at Morgan Stanley, but “there’s still an enormous amount of layoffs going on.”

In other news, the U.S. government’s supply of remdesivir, the only drug known to work against COVID-19, will run out at the end of the month, Dr. Robert Kadlec, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) official, told CNN.

The government’s last shipment of the drug will go out the week of June 29. Gilead Sciences, the company that makes remdesivir, is ramping up to make more, but it’s unclear how much will be available this summer.

“Right now, we’re waiting to hear from Gilead what is their expected delivery availability of the drug as we go from June to July,” Kadlec said. “We’re kind of not in negotiations, but in discussions with Gilead as they project what the availability of their product will be.”

The government has been working to help Gilead “with some of their supply chain challenges in terms of raw materials and being able to accelerate the process,” said Kadlec, the HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response.

He added that it’s clear that “whatever the supply may be, there may not be enough for everyone who may need it.”

Vaccine search

Meanwhile, the search for an effective vaccine goes on. The HHS said in late May that it would provide up to $1.2 billion to the drug company AstraZeneca to develop a potential coronavirus vaccine from Oxford University, in England.

The fourth, and largest, vaccine research agreement funds a clinical trial of the potential vaccine in the United States this summer with about 30,000 volunteers, the Times reported.

The goal? To make at least 300 million doses that could be available as early as October, the HHS said in a statement.

The United States has already agreed to provide up to $483 million to the biotech company Moderna and $500 million to Johnson & Johnson for their vaccine efforts. It is also providing $30 million to a virus vaccine effort led by the French company Sanofi, the Times reported. On Thursday, Moderna said a large clinical trial of its vaccine candidate could begin in July.

According to a Times tally, the top five states in coronavirus cases as of Monday are: New York with over 387,000; New Jersey with over 166,000; California with over 151,000; Illinois with more than 133,000; and Massachusetts with over 105,000.

Nations grapple with pandemic

Elsewhere in the world, the situation remains challenging.

Even as the pandemic is easing in Europe and some parts of Asia, it is worsening in India. The country has loosened some of the social distancing enacted in the world’s largest lockdown, even as cases surge. As of Monday, India has more than 332,000 cases, a Johns Hopkins tally shows.

Brazil has also become a hotspot in the coronavirus pandemic, with over 43,000 deaths and nearly 868,000 confirmed infections by Monday, according to the Hopkins tally. U.S. President Donald Trump has issued a ban on all foreign travelers from Brazil because of the burgeoning number of COVID-19 cases in that country, CNN reported.

President Jair Bolsonaro’s government had stopped publishing a running total of coronavirus deaths and infections, the Associated Press reported. Critics called the move, which came after official numbers showed Brazil had the third-highest number of deaths and the second-highest number of cases in the world, an attempt to hide the true toll of the disease. A Supreme Court justice on Tuesday ordered publication of the cumulative totals of cases and deaths be resumed, the wire service reported.

Cases are also spiking wildly in Russia: As of Monday, that country reported the world’s third-highest number of COVID-19 cases, at over 536,000, the Hopkins tally showed.

Worldwide, the number of reported infections passed 7.9 million on Monday, with nearly 434,000 deaths, according to the Hopkins tally.

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more on the new coronavirus.