The second surge of coronavirus cases in the U.S. appear to be levelling off following public officials’ issues of mask mandates and freezing or rolling back plans to re-open states.
In June, the country was hard hit with a wave of new infections, with new states becoming critical hotspots in the spread of coronavirus.
“This first wave that we see now across Florida, Texas, California, and Arizona began with under 30-year-olds — many who were asymptomatic and didn’t know they were spreading it,” the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, Dr. Deborah Birx told NBC’s Savannah Guthrie.
She also added that everyone should take precautions to help protect people who are at higher risk of getting severely ill from the virus. “They have to assume that they’re infected and positive and we all need to protect those who need our protection right now.”
On Friday (July 31), Dr. Birx said on the Today show, “We’re already starting to see some plateauing in these critical four states that have suffered under the last four weeks. So Texas, California, Arizona and Florida, those major metros and throughout their counties.”
However, she continued to call on Americans to wear masks and increase social distancing “to really stop the spread of this epidemic.”
ABC News reports that only seven states and territories are seeing an increase in the number of new cases – 10 states have reached a plateau, while the numbers are going down in 39 states, according to an internal FEMA memo.
But despite the slow in the spread, fatalities continue to increase. The U.S. has seen a 7% increase in new deaths compared to the previous week. Still, the figure is lower than the 20-30% week-over-week increase the country has seen of late.
According to Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, the country will continue to see the effects of the recent spikes in the next few weeks.
“If all of us in the U.S. stay at home for two weeks, mortality will still go up a little bit because of what we have done before,” he said. “Then it will start coming down.”
“What happens automatically in states where you see a large increase and it gets in the news, automatically people start putting up their guards,” he added. However, he also cautions that no one should get complacent when case numbers stop spiking, lest they repeat the cycle all over again.
As of the time of this writing, the U.S. has over 4.7 Million reported coronavirus cases, with the death toll almost reaching 160,000. (Source: John Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center).
Federal guidelines advise that states should achieve a 14-day period of downward trajectory of documented cases before proceeding to a phased opening. If cases continue to increase or remain at high levels, lifting social distancing measures prematurely could result in a resurgence of new cases.
