
(HealthDay News) — Nearly 36,000 American lives would have been spared if strict social distancing measures had been enacted across the country just one week earlier than they were, new estimates suggest. And if those measures had been imposed two weeks before most people started staying home, about 54,000 COVID-19 deaths would have been avoided by early May, Columbia University disease models show, The New York Times reported. The U.S. coronavirus death toll stretched past 93,000 on Thursday, with more than 1.5 million cases. “It’s a big, big difference,” Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia and leader of the modeling team, told Times. “That small moment in time, catching it in that growth phase, is incredibly critical in reducing the number of deaths.” On the economic front, another round of weekly jobless claims delivered more bad news: 2.4 million filed for unemployment, bringing the total jobless number for the past nine weeks to more than 38 million. Meanwhile, all 50 states have started reopening their economies, more than two months after the new coronavirus first forced America into lockdown. States in the Northeast and on the West Coast, as well as Democratic-led states in the Midwest, have moved more slowly toward reopening, the Times reported. But a number of states in the South opened earlier and more expansively, albeit with social distancing restrictions in place,… read on >