In absence of national leadership, US states scramble to curb Covid

NEW YORK: Individual US states scrambled on Sunday to impose lockdowns to stem coronavirus spikes amid a lack of national leadership on how to curb infections until vaccines are widely available in the spring.

Dr Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, expressed frustration over the mixed messages coming from the Trump administration that are reflected in some Americans’ perception about masks, social distancing and super-spreader events.

“Right now, across the Sun Belt, we have governors and mayors who have cases equivalent to what they had in the summertime yet aren’t putting in the same policies and mitigations that they put in the summer, that they know changed the course of this pandemic across the South,” she said on NBC’s show “Meet the Press”.

“So it is frustrating because not only do we know what works, governors and mayors used those tools to stem the tide in the spring and the summer,” Birx said.

Only about half of the 50 US states have enacted new restrictions in the last month as cases, deaths and hospitalisations hit record levels nationwide. Fourteen states do not mandate masks.

President-elect Joe Biden, a Democrat who defeated Donald Trump in the November election, has said that upon taking office on Jan 20 he would enact mask mandates where he has authority, such as federal buildings and for interstate travel.

While many businesses are shutting down, Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, says schools should reopen before bars do and after health experts in Europe and Britain have found that children may have lower infectivity than adults.

In New York City, some public schools in the nation’s largest school district prepared to reopen for daily in-person classes on Monday after a citywide campus shutdown. An estimated 190,000 children in programmes geared for early childhood, elementary and special needs students would be eligible to return to classrooms, the city said.

New York girds up to reopen schools while across the Hudson River, New Jersey over the weekend halted indoor youth sports after at least 28 outbreaks affected 170 people. Governor Phil Murphy’s ban targets sports like basketball, ice hockey and swimming, including practice and games, until at least Jan 2.

The nation’s most populous state, California, on Sunday began shutting down bars, hair salons and barbershops, and allowing restaurants to remain open only for takeout and delivery service in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley.

The San Francisco Bay Area was to go into lockdown starting at 10pm on Sunday night, under a different set of orders.