The Texas governor slowed to reopen his state on Thursday when hospitals were flooded with “an explosion” of new cases of COVID-19 and authorities warned there may not be enough beds available.
“The last thing we want to do as a state is go back and close business,” Governor Greg Abbott said in a statement. “This temporary pause will help our state corner the spread until we can safely enter the next phase of opening our state for business.”
Abbott urged “all Texans to do their part to stop the spread of COVID-19 by wearing a mask, washing their hands regularly, and socially distancing themselves from others.”
“The more we follow all of these guidelines, the more secure our state will be and the more we can open Texas for business,” he said.
Abbott’s startling statement came shortly after he issued an executive order designed to free more beds in the state’s four largest counties by postponing “all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately medically necessary.”
Not long after that, the Texas Medical Center in Houston reported that all ICU beds were occupied.
But the sad news was not only limited to Texas, as the United States saw a record number of new coronavirus cases in a single day, with 45,557 reported on Wednesday, according to an NBC News count.
Southern and western states, such as Arizona and Florida, that began aggressively reopening around Memorial Day are now seeing staggering spikes that make it clear that the deadly virus shows no signs of disappearing, as President Donald has predicted. Trump repeatedly.
Overnight, Florida added 5,004 new cases of COVID-19 and the death toll in the state increased to 3,327. Arizona reported 3,056 new cases and 27 additional deaths on Thursday. And there was still no evidence that the Black Lives Matter protests that spread across the nation in the past three weeks after the George Floyd police murder were fueling the surge.
“We reopened in the context of a large persistent spread in those states, so it is inevitable that cases will increase,” former Federal Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”. “I think they have increased more than most people expected, and I have certainly been surprised by the acceleration in the cases as well. I think most of us were.
In Texas, Dr. Faisal Masud, medical director of critical care medicine at the Houston Methodist hospital system, said they were driving for now, “but if this trajectory is that of the past 10 days, when we literally had triple our cases. ” — We can’t do that for a couple of weeks at all. “
“This is not good,” he told NBC News. “The explosion of patients everywhere, that explosion has to decrease.”
In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo insisted Thursday that he was serious about applying the two-week quarantine that he and the governors of New Jersey and Connecticut want all visitors to current coronavirus-critical states like Texas to follow, Florida and Alabama.
“The law is that if you come from another state, you have to quarantine for 14 days,” Cuomo said on CNN. “If you don’t, and you get caught, you will have broken the law, you can be fined.”
“If you fly to New York, we will have your name, we will know where you are supposed to be. There will be random checks, “she added.
But police and public health experts told NBC News they have serious doubts about whether such a requirement can be enforced, while an expert suggested Cuomo’s move was political retribution against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who had asked New Yorkers self-quarantine for two weeks in March when coronavirus cases skyrocketed in New York.
In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that the city was “on its way” to begin phase three of its reopening on July 6. That would include reopening outdoor recreation areas like dog courts and basketball courts, and allowing indoor dining in restaurants and restaurants. operation of nail salons at 50 percent capacity.
As the country closed to stop the spread of the coronavirus, the pandemic abruptly halted the economy that started under President Barack Obama and continued under Trump.
The effects of that were evident on Wednesday when the Labor Department reported that 1.48 million people applied for unemployment benefits last week. It was the fourteenth week in a row that states processed more than a million applications for the first time.
Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, admitted in an interview with the Fox Business Network on Thursday that “there are spikes at critical points, there is no doubt about it, and there will be some closings, at individual locations.”
But Kudlow said he believes the unemployment rate will be less than 10 percent by the end of the year and that “it will be a constant drum with more jobs and less unemployment.”
The current national unemployment rate is 13.3 percent, according to the Department of Labor.
