US Department of Health and Human Services ADM Brett P. Giroir testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the Trump Administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, on Capitol Hill, Washington , DC, June 23, 2020.
Kevin Dietsch | Pool via Reuters
Closing indoor bars and getting almost everyone to wear masks in public is “really as good as turning it off” and will help stop the growing outbreaks of coronavirus across the country, a senior White House health official said Thursday.
“We are all concerned about the increase in cases we are currently seeing across the country and, as you know, more than 50% of those cases occur in four states: Arizona, Texas, Florida and California,” said Admiral Brett, Deputy Secretary of Health. Giroir told reporters on a conference call. “But we are seeing similar trends in several states, primarily in the Sun Belt.”
“But the bottom line is that we know what to do to stop the current outbreak,” he added. “Now we have very, very good models that in warm areas, these red areas that have high cases, that have high percentages on the rise, it is very, very important to really close the interior bars.”
He said 50% to 70% of new cases have been traced to a single bar in some areas and “secondary spread from that.” He added that the same concerns also apply to indoor restaurants, and they should be operating at 25% of capacity.
“Being indoors, indoors, for long periods of time is just a recipe for spreading,” he said, adding that outdoor seating for restaurants and bars is “probably really safe.”
In “hot spots”, nearly 90% of people should wear masks “when interacting with other people” to control the spread, he said.
“If we have that degree of compliance with these simple measures, our models say that’s really as good as closing it,” he added. “These simple facts can really stop the outbreak without completely closing off your local area.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tuesday asked Americans to wear masks to help contain the spread of the virus. Director Dr. Robert Redfield told Dr. Howard Bauchner of the Journal of the American Medical Association in an interview Tuesday that the United States could control its outbreak in one to two months if every American wore a mask.
“The time is now,” said Redfield. “I think if we could get everyone to wear a mask right now, I think in four, six, or eight weeks we could control this epidemic.”
Despite the growing number of new cases, Giroir said Thursday that the United States is “in a very different place today than it was in April.” He said the United States has more tools to fight Covid-19, such as better clinical treatment, therapies like remdesivir, steroids and convalescent plasma, and more widespread testing. Coronavirus researchers and public health specialists have hoped that these tools will mean that a smaller portion of infected people will die than in the most affected areas in March and April.
However, some of the benefits of those tools could be affected by the magnitude of current outbreaks in the US The country’s testing infrastructure, for example, is struggling to keep up with the demands of expanding outbreaks. .
Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, two of the nation’s largest diagnostic labs, said earlier this week that increased demand for tests is slowing their response time. Quest said results for patients who are not “priority 1” now take more than seven days, which public health experts say makes the tests almost useless to track cases and isolate people who have been exposed.
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