About two months have passed this week since many states began their reopening plans, which now officials across the country say came too quickly.
In Florida, officials closed several beaches across the state in hopes of avoiding the July 4 crowds. The state reported 9,999 new cases of coronavirus on Sunday, bringing Florida’s total to more than 200,000 infections.
“There is no doubt … that when we reopened, people began to socialize as if the virus did not exist,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez told ABC this week.
In Texas, which reported its second-highest day of new cases over the weekend, a local leader said the state opened “too early, too much,” prompting Houston hospitals to increase capacity in recent days. .
“Illusions are neither good economic policy nor good public health policy,” Texas Judge Lina Hidalgo said on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday. “If we had stayed closed longer and opened more slowly, we would probably be in a more sustainable place in our economy.”
The announcement came days after the governor himself, who pushed for one of the country’s most aggressive reopening plans, closed the bars.
Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego told ABC “This Week” that her state “opened too early,” attributing much of the “explosion” in cases to people ages 20 to 44.
Record 32-state increase in cases
These are the states that report an increase in cases compared to the previous week, according to data from Johns Hopkins University:
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio , Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Washington State, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Cases are constant in 14 states: Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.
New cases are trending downward in Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire.
Florida authorities were unable to contact trace
While Florida emerges as the nation’s top access point, a CNN investigation found that health authorities were often unable to follow up on contacts, which was long considered a key tool in containing coronavirus outbreaks.
CNN spoke to 27 Floridians, or their families, who tested positive for the virus and only five said they received a call from health authorities asking for their contacts.
It is unclear how many contract trackers are employed by the state. A spokesperson for the state health department told CNN that there are 1,600 people “currently involved in contact tracing of every positive COVID-19 case in Florida,” but another said that there are 2,300 “people involved in contact tracing.” .
According to the Florida Department of Health, when someone tests positive for Covid-19, the department “conducts an extensive epidemiological investigation in conjunction with the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to identify individuals who may have had close contact with the virus. “
When CNN asked Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, how the nation is doing in contact tracing, he replied, “I don’t think we’re doing very well.”
Remdesivir should be reserved for very sick patients, according to an official
Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, Commissioner of the United States Food and Drug Administration, said Sunday that the United States government intends to “increase remivision to areas that need it most.”
Remdesivir is an antiviral that is the only drug that has FDA emergency authorization for use in treating coronavirus infections.
Hahn said the country’s remdesivir supply has not been depleted and is being distributed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
“The Vice President and I and others were in Florida and this problem came up and we are getting that feedback and then we send remdesivir to make it available to people who need it,” said Hahn.
Last week, HHS announced that it had sent the final allocation for the antiviral drug, raising concerns that there would not be enough to help states experiencing a sharp rise in infections.
The country currently has enough to regress if the pandemic does not worsen, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Sunday on CBS’s “Face The Nation”.
For the supply to last, the drug must be reserved for seriously ill or hospitalized Covid-19 patients, Gottlieb said.
“But if the epidemic worsens and we want to extend the use of the drug to patients who are not as ill but who have pre-existing conditions that predict they may become seriously ill, we do not have enough medicine for that and that is what we would do.” to have wanted, “he said.
“We would have had to lay the foundation for that months ago, and we didn’t.”
CNN’s Elizabeth Cohen, Chuck Johnston, Wes Bruer and Dana Vigue contributed to this report.
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