Missouri, Montana and Oklahoma were among those who experienced the largest buildup in the percentage of infections in the following week, the Washington Post reported. At the same time, the number of new instances in Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama has consistently outnumbered all other states.
Experts are also seeing worried trends in major east and midwest cities, the Post reported, and predicting primary outbreaks in college towns when categories resume in August.
However, President Trump continued his efforts to absolutely reopen schools on Monday. “Ideally, we should open up those schools. Let’s open up,” Trump said at a white house working group briefing on Coronavirus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert, agreed Monday and told CNN that schools and school campuses across the country will be able to reopen, but officials will have to prioritize protection.
The default position with kindergartens, grade schools and high schools should be to reopen them, Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CNN.
On college campuses, Fauci said the plans come with testing others before they arrive on campus, when they arrive and quarantine them for 14 days.
“If done properly, it would not be a risk, but then again, you’ve got to be careful when you get people coming in from outside,” he said. “But I think if they maintain the guidelines that are put together for people coming back, then they should be fine.”
Regardless of what safety measures need to be taken to reopen schools this fall, many students need the psychological and nutritional benefits of being in school, Fauci added.
At the coronavirus task force briefing on Monday, Trump also announced that his administration is taking steps to give telehealth a broader role in Medicare, using an executive order that calls on Congress to make doctor visits via personal technology a permanent fixture of the government’s health insurance program for seniors.
The order is specific in its target: It applies to seniors living in rural communities. But administration officials told the Post that it signals that Trump is ready to back significant legislation that would permanently open up telehealth as an option for all people with Medicare.
Final stage vaccine trials underway
On the vaccine front, the final stages of two possible vaccines opposite COVID-19 have been launched.
In one trial, the first of 30,000 volunteers will be given either a vaccine developed by Moderna Inc. and the U.S. National Institutes of Health or a placebo shot, the Post reported.
Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has also announced that it was starting a 30,000-person final phase vaccine trial, to be conducted at 120 sites globally.
Fauci predicted that researchers would probably be able to tell whether the Moderna vaccine was effective by November or December, although he added that it was a “distinct possibility” an answer could come sooner. Pfizer officials have said the company expects to be able to seek regulatory authorization or approval for its vaccine by October, the Post reported.
As instances have increased and testing has been delayed, tactile search is appropriate in many parts of the country.
In many Florida cities, a state that has noticed an accumulation in the number of instances over the next month, the government has largely abandoned the follow-up instances, and the scenario is just as bleak in California, the Times reported.
“I think it’s simple to say that touch studies are interrupted,” Carolyn Cannuscio, a strategy expert and associate professor in the family medicine and network fitness circle at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Times Carolyn Cannuscio. “It’s damaged because a lot of portions of our prevention formula are damaged.”
On Tuesday, the number of coronavirus cases in the United States exceeded 4.7 million as the death toll approached 156,000, at a Times count.
According to the same count, the five most sensitive states in coronavirus cases as of Tuesday were: California with more than 522,000; Florida with nearly 492,000; Texas with nearly 462,000, New York with more than 421,500 and New Jersey with more than 184,400.
Nations a pandemic
In other parts of the world, it remains difficult.
In Australia, the premier of Victoria declared a “state of disaster” on Sunday, announcing even stricter lockdown measures, introducing a nightly curfew and banning virtually all trips outdoors after Australia’s second largest state recorded 671 new infections in a single day.
“We have to do more, and we have to do more right now,” said Premier Daniel Andrews. “Where you slept last night is where you’ll need to stay for the next six weeks.”
Things continue to worsen in India. On Tuesday, the country passed 1.8 million infections and nearly 39,000 deaths, a Johns Hopkins tally showed. The surge comes weeks after a national lockdown was lifted, and it’s prompted some parts of the country to revert back to stricter social distancing measures. Only the United States and Brazil have higher caseloads.
Brazil is also a hotspot in the coronavirus pandemic, with over 2.7 million confirmed infections by Tuesday, according to the Hopkins tally. It has the second-highest number of cases, behind only the United States.
Cases are also spiking wildly in Russia: As of Tuesday, that country reported the world’s fourth-highest number of COVID-19 cases, at nearly 859,700, the Hopkins tally showed.