Mitigation measures such as crowd control and closing bars are working, CDC director Dr Robert Redfield said Thursday, but it will take time for them to be reflected in the figures.
“It is important to understand that these interventions have a delay, that lag will be three to four weeks,” Redfield said in an interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Hopefully this week and next week you will start to see that the death rate is really starting to drop.”
But Redfield warned that although officials have seen cases fall over red zones in the country, cases in yellow zones over the heart of the U.S. do not.
“Central America is stuck right now,” he said. “That’s why it’s so important for Central America to recognize the mitigation that we’re talking about … it’s also for Central America, the Nebraska, the Oklahomas.”
“We don’t have to have a third wave in the heartland at the moment,” he said. “We need to prevent that.”
Superspeading events help drive pandemics
Biostatistician Max Lau of Emory University and a team analyzed data from the Georgia Department of Health in more than 9,500 Covid-19 cases in four metro Atlanta area counties and Dougherty County in rural southwest Georgia between March and May.
“Overall, about 2% of cases were directly responsible for 20% of all infections,” she wrote in her report.
“Dispersal is first and foremost, we see in social situations, family gatherings where people are unmasked, and in close contact and in principle leave their guard,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine Thursday.
Up to 60 million Americans are likely to be infected
Experts have long said that the true number of infections across the country is likely to be many times higher than the reported cases.
On Thursday, Redfield said up to 60 million Americans may have contracted the virus – more than 10 times the number of cases recorded.
“I think if you do a rough estimate, somewhere between 30 and 60 million people – but let’s get the data out and see what the data shows,” he said.
There are many reasons why the number of true infections remains uncertain.
White House declares teachers essential workers
Meanwhile, amid a turbulent season after school, the White House created new pressure for a return to normal education.
Under the guidance of Homeland Security, released this week, teachers are now considered “critical infrastructure workers”, and are subject to the same kinds of advice as other workers who have given birth to that label – such as doctors and legislators.
Guidance for essential workers states that they can continue to work, even after exposure to a confirmed case of the virus, as long as they remain asymptomatic.
In the U.S., institutions have been torn between remote instruction or implementing dozens of new measures to prevent virus clusters around personal learning. Many teachers have protested against a return to instruction in person, saying this could prove fatal. Some have chosen to resign instead of going back to class amid the pandemic.
CNN’s Sarah Westwood and Shelby Lin Erdman contributed to this report.
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