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The White House coronavirus task force warns of a persistent and widespread spread of Covid-19 in the western half of the United States and its members urged aggressive mitigation measures.
“We are on a very difficult trajectory. We are going in the wrong direction, ”said Dr. Anthony Fauci, the task force’s chief public health official and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Fauci noted that coronavirus cases are increasing in 47 states and patients are overwhelming hospitals in the US.
“If things don’t change, if they continue the way we are, there will be a lot of pain in this country regarding additional cases, hospitalizations and deaths,” Fauci said in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday. night.
The White House coronavirus task force has warned central and western states that aggressive mitigation measures will be necessary, according to weekly state reports obtained by CNN.
“We continue to see a relentless and broad community in the Midwest, Upper Midwest and West. This will require aggressive mitigation to control both silent and asymptomatic spread and symptomatic spread, ”said a state report.
Reports from the task force said cooler weather is a major factor in the rise as friends and families move gatherings indoors. He urged states to step up efforts to encourage mask wear, social distancing, and avoid crowds in public spaces.
On Thursday morning, Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, warned on ABC’s Good Morning America of rising infections that: “We are not prepared for this wave.”
He said that eight months after the outbreak in the United States, things were not where they should be.
And he warned the United States to look to Europe, where he said infections started to rise again about a month ago in places like France, but because authorities were slow to respond, they now had to take more drastic measures: France just ordered a national shutdown.
“This is what we want to avoid,” he said, but added: “That is where we are headed if we don’t act quickly.”
Hospitalizations in the United States are on the rise, a metric unaffected by the number of tests performed. Thirteen states, mostly in the Midwest and West, reported a record number of hospitalized patients with Covid-19 on Wednesday, according to a Reuters analysis.
Wisconsin, a hotly contested battleground in next week’s US presidential election, is one of 36 states where coronavirus hospitalizations are increasing by at least 10% compared to the previous week and chiefs Doctors have declared a crisis.
Michigan, another electoral battleground state, posted a one-day record of more than 3,500 new cases.
Donald Trump is fighting for re-election next Tuesday against Democratic challenger Joe Biden. He and his fellow Democrats in Congress have criticized Trump for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump pushed to reopen the U.S. economy, sometimes against the advice of his own administration’s health experts, while many of his supporters in Michigan and elsewhere protested lockdown and mitigation efforts.
Illinois reported more than 6,000 new cases Wednesday, the largest increase of any state in the country and surpassing 5,700 new cases in the much more populous state of Texas and 4,200 new cases in California, according to a Reuters tally of state and county reports. . .
