City mayors who saw massive spikes in coronavirus cases on Sunday rejected optimistic projections about the pandemic, saying that mixed messages at different levels of government led to confusion among residents, many of whom began to believe that the crisis was over and it was safe to return to pre-pandemic norms.
They said the aggressive reopening timelines followed by state officials in Texas, Florida and Arizona allowed people to crowd into bars, restaurants and other recently reopened places where the coronavirus spreads easily. At the same time, state officials were preventing local leaders from implementing more restrictive policies at the city or county level than those established across the state.
And they put some guilt at the feet of President Trump
Donald John Trump protesters tear down the Christopher Columbus statue on Baltimore Independence Day star Bill Pullman, urging Americans to wear a “mask of freedom” on July 4., who has been reluctant to wear a mask and has projected his confidence that the pandemic will soon end, even saying that 99 percent of cases of the virus were “totally harmless.”
“President Trump was in my community, he chose not to wear a mask, and he is having big events while trying to pressure people to stay home and events with more than 10 people to be dangerous according to the Centers for Disease Control, “said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego (D) on ABC’s” This Week “.
Austin Mayor Steve Adler (D) also hit the White House for “ambiguous” messages.
“It pisses me off,” Adler said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “You know, I understand that he has a difficult job, but it’s dangerous not to send a clear message to the Americans.”
“When they start hearing that kind of ambiguous message coming out of Washington, there are more and more people who don’t wear masks, who don’t go the social distance, who won’t do whatever it takes to keep a community safe.” added.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner (D) also rejected the “harmless” comment, saying the city’s hospitals were in danger of being overwhelmed.
“If we don’t get this virus under control quickly, our hospitals could be in serious trouble,” Turner said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “The main problem is staffing … we can always provide additional beds, but we need people, nurses, and everyone else in the medical profession to take care of those beds.”
Arizona and Texas have seen large increases in coronavirus infections in the past few weeks. Arizona currently has the highest daily number of new coronavirus cases per capita in the entire country, and Texas broke its own record for new coronavirus cases on Saturday, reporting 8,258 new cases and 33 new deaths. The state has reported a total of 191,790 cases.
Not only messages from the White House confuse residents, several local leaders said. The policies implemented by the governors have also led to a false sense of security and, in turn, have caused cases to rise, they argued.
“We open too early in Arizona,” said Gallego.
“Our young people ages 20 to 44, who are my own demographic, really led the blast, and we’ve seen tremendous growth in that area. We are seeing many people go to large family gatherings and infect their relatives. “
She added: “I think that when the nightclubs were open, she sent the signal that we had defeated COVID again, and that’s obviously not the case.”
In Texas, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo (D) asked the state to resume an order to stay home, saying one of the biggest challenges in dealing with the outbreak has been “mixed messages from different levels of government.” .
Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) stepped back from the reopening of the state and ordered the closure of all bars. He also instituted a statewide mask requirement.
Hidalgo, the chief administrator of the county, which contains Houston, said on ABC “This Week” that she is grateful for the new measures, but “as long as we do as little as possible and hope for the best, we are always going to pursue this. We are always going to being late and the virus will always beat us. “
And in Florida, Miami Mayor Francis Suárez (R), a survivor of the virus, said on ABC “This Week” that “[i]It is clear that growth is exponential at this point, “saying the increase supported his decision to make Miami the last major city in Florida to reopen.
“They criticized me for waiting so long,” he said. “But there is no doubt that when we reopened, people began to socialize as if the virus did not exist.”
Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Giménez (R) blamed county residents more, saying they had “let their guard down” and also blamed protests that have erupted across the United States since the death of George Floyd. Although the sites of the biggest protests in New York, Minneapolis and Washington DC have not seen similar peaks.
“We saw a rapid increase in COVID-19 positive youth in mid-June, and I think that had a lot to do with socializing, youth going to parties, maybe graduation parties at home,” said Giménez.
Florida reported 11,458 new cases of coronavirus on Saturday, breaking its previous record for that Thursday. Last week the governor Ron DeSantis
Ronald Dion DeSantisFlorida breaks single-day record with more than 11,000 new cases of coronavirus Infectious diseases specialist: Florida ‘going a million miles an hour in the wrong direction’ Miami-Dade imposes curfew for the weekend of July 4 MORE (R) ordered bars closed throughout the state.
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