Two other states with less stringent social distancing rules where the trend also seems worrisome, he says, are Florida and Texas. Andrew Cuomo's 'New York State on PAUSE' executive order went into effect on March 22.Īrizona's status is particularly concerning to Jha because the state has a larger-than-average share of older residents – and the virus kills older people at vastly higher rates. Tremaine Fredericks rides a nearly empty Staten Island Ferry to Manhattan in New York City. You want to be testing a lot of people because that's how you capture all the positive cases.' 'One thing we know is that if more than 10 to 15% of your tests are positive, you are probably not testing enough. In Arizona, for example, more than half of those who have been tested have been found to have the coronavirus. In the meantime, health experts such as Jha argue that even places with low numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases should operate on the assumption that there may be a substantial amount of transmission in their midst that is going undetected. In the interview with NPR Fauci conceded that, 'to be honest, we don't have all that data now uniformly throughout the country to make those determinations.'

is still so behind on testing that it's impossible to know whether a low number of official cases in a particular city or state isn't actually masking a brewing hotspot. lacks the testing capacity to do containment this way. can ultimately pivot to in areas where the number of infections is low.īut Jha and others maintain that right now, the U.S. This is also essentially the strategy that many public health experts hope the U.S. governors stating that his administration would soon be issuing guidelines to determine which states could ease up on social distancing and follow such a containment approach. Later Thursday, President Trump released a letter to U.S. containment.'įauci then described a strategy of seeking out and identifying people with symptoms, testing them, isolating those who have the virus and tracing their contacts. 'But there are regions of the country where rather than shut down, we should be doing. 'I mean, obviously, you always keep an open mind that you might have to revert to something like that,' said Fauci. Day porter Luis Almenas disinfected all the microphones during a deep clean in the Senate chambers on March 12.Īnthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key leader of the administration's COVID-19 response, said, in an interview with NPR on Thursday, that a 'uniform' nationwide shutdown is not warranted because of the variation in rates of infection across states. In several of them, the number of people with positive tests for the coronavirus is relatively low: no more than several hundred, compared with the tens of thousands now infected in New York.Ĭonnecticut's legislature is suspended until at least April 12 to follow the state's social distancing guidelines. These states include Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, North Dakota and Utah.

Some states have no statewide limitations whatsoever on either gatherings or business operations other than restaurants. Many other states have opted for measures that are weaker - for instance, declining to shut businesses, and limiting their prohibitions on gatherings to groups of more than 10 or even 50 people. So far 13 states have enacted the strictest combination of restrictions - closures of all nonessential business as well as a prohibition on all gatherings - according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Many of them will end up dying because of that delay.' Moreover, adds Jha, 'you're still going to have to deal with the fallout of all the people who got very sick and ended up overwhelming the health care system. Each sick person passes it on to something like two to three others - who then spread it to the next two to three people, and so on, such that a single case quickly leads to thousands. He notes that when the virus is left unchecked, it infects people at an exponential rate. 'At this point, there's really no good excuse for any state official not to have these policies in effect,' says Jha. In fact, state officials should have taken this action at least 10 days ago, argues Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, one of a number of public health professionals who for weeks have been urging states to be more aggressive.

'We are seeing community spread in every state. On this point, 'there is no question about it,' says Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary of homeland security who is now faculty chair of the homeland security program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. We'll start with the call for a nationwide lockdown.

Here's the breakdown of what health experts are saying about each issue.

March 2020 lockdown california