US shutting again as local leaders reverse reopenings amid Covid-19 spread

Leaders in California, Florida and Texas acknowledge they may require a return of stricter lockdown

While US President Donald Trump obsesses about his re-election hopes in his White House bubble, state and local leaders are frantically reversing state reopenings that he demanded, which turned America into the world’s biggest coronavirus hotspot.

Leaders in the country’s three most populous states acknowledged on Monday that the outbreaks they have been battling for months were on the rise and may require a return of stricter lockdown measures.

California, Florida and Texas have reported a total of at least 892,000 cases since the start of the pandemic, according to The New York Times database. On Monday alone, there were at least 30,000 new cases recorded across the three states, 18 per cent of the world’s daily total.

There will be strict new orders in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom said he would move to close indoor operations statewide for restaurants, wineries, movie theatres, zoos and card rooms. Bars would be forced to close all operations.

 

And in 30 of California’s hardest hit counties — where 80 per cent of the state’s 39 million residents live — even more restrictions were put in place. In those counties, businesses would be forced to close indoor operations for fitness centers, places of worship, noncritical offices, hair salons and barbershops, and malls.

“We’re going back into modification mode of our original stay-at-home order,” Newsom, a Democrat, said. “This continues to be a deadly disease.”

California’s two largest public school districts, in Los Angeles and San Diego, said on Monday that instruction would be remote-only in the fall. In Texas, a top medical adviser to Governor Greg Abbott said the state may need to roll back its reopening plans and reinstitute an economic lockdown if cases keep rising.

The adviser, Dr Mark McClellan, is a physician and an economist at Duke University who is a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. He said a lockdown in Texas was a “real possibility” that Abbott may be forced to impose in the next few weeks.

“I don’t think we have much time, before having to go to a more extreme step,” McClellan said. Already, the rapid spread has forced Abbott, a Republican, to reverse course by temporarily pausing the state’s reopening, closing bars again and issuing a mask order for most Texans. In Florida, deaths are trending upward and are at their highest seven-day average level of the pandemic. 

©2020 The New York Times News Service