America faces a carousel of closures and restrictions as it struggles to control the spread of the coronavirus, with Houston’s mayor proposing a two-week shutdown while the top official in Miami Beach said his city is a week or two away from requiring another order to shelter in place.
The urgent warnings come a day after California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered a sweeping shutdown of indoor activities — enraging some Republicans — and as major school districts from San Diego to Atlanta defy President Trump and opt for online learning to start the school year.
All told, nearly two dozen states are pausing or reversing efforts to reopen as flare ups, especially across the South and the West, are erupting, despite a series of lockdowns last spring that were designed to “flatten the curve” and maintain hospital capacity.
The closures are exacerbating an already difficult situation for smaller businesses. More than 80% of small employers that received loans from the Paycheck Protection Program said they will run out of money by the start of August, according to a Goldman Sachs survey released Tuesday.
The survey of over 1,500 businesses underscores the pressure on Congress to extend additional relief, as lawmakers try to agree on the next relief package by the end of the month.
In a letter decrying Mr. Newsom’s moves, four congressmen and state legislators representing Northern California said that 7.5 million residents were still without jobs, and that the state has yet to process some unemployment benefit claims filed in March.
“Restaurants and churches are not the source of our increase in cases,” their statement said. “Small businesses are hanging by a thread and this action puts all the burden of this crisis back upon them. Main Street is struggling for its very life, while Lowe’s and Home Depot are packed with people and having record years. No one can make any sense of these confusing orders.”
Florida, meanwhile, reported over 9,100 new cases from the previous day — far below the single-day record of 15,000-plus over the weekend — though it set a one-day record for deaths, at 132.
“People are apprehensive, people are hurting,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a roundtable with mayors.
The governor said the new infections are concentrated in the 25-34 age group that can likely fight off the disease, though he’s worried about rampant transmission spilling into more vulnerable populations over age 65.
Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, said Miami-Dade County is the epicenter of the spread. Statewide, the positivity rate is holding steady at about 14%, or above the 10% that health experts say should be the upper limit to ensure enough cases are caught.
The governor said hospitals still have space to handle the surge but staffing is a challenge and jurisdictions will have to pull together to meet the moment.
Dan Gelber, the mayor of Miami Beach, said his jurisdiction and other spots in Florida are likely a week or two away from resorting to strict “shelter-in-place” orders if the coronavirus situation does not improve.
“If our hospitals are incapable of providing care to the community, that’s a hard stop for everybody,” Mr. Gelber said on CNN. “So I suspect if in a week or two this is not changed in any way, then we’re all going to do it.”
“Whether the governor wants us to or not, we’ll do it. The county will do it, lots of the cities will do it — it’ll just be a shelter-in-place again,” he said.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez has resisted ordering a countywide shutdown so far, saying he wants to see the effect of a new curfew and other measures first.
Likewise, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has balked at calls from local leaders like Mr. Turner to authorize local shutdowns. He says he wants county officials to enforce limits on gatherings and enforce his statewide mandate to wear masks.
The U.S. has recorded nearly 3.4 million cases and over 136,000 deaths, although the fatality rate has slowed as cases pop up in a younger demographic and treatments improve.
Governors in the Northeast on Tuesday continued to warn against complacency as they try to preserve hard-won gains against the virus. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan told county leaders to enforce health rules at bars and restaurants.
“We cannot allow a small segment of willful violators to squander our collective efforts and jeopardize our state’s recovery,” Mr. Hogan, a Republican, tweeted.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, said visitors from four more states — Minnesota, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin — must self-quarantine for 14 days when entering his state, bringing the total to 22 states. He continues to fear widespread transmission in other places will spark new outbreaks at home.
Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health and other experts say the U.S. is seeing the fraught upshot of its decision to lock down only part of its economy, while parts of Europe decided to accept deeper pain early on to tamp down transmission.
“In Europe, they went up, they peaked and then they went right down to baseline,” Dr. Fauci told a virtual event hosted by Georgetown University.
Dr. Fauci has said the U.S. shut down only 50% to 55% of society, and that’s why coronavirus case numbers went up, started to come down, but then plateaued at a relatively high level of about 20,000 infections per day.
More recently, daily coronavirus cases in the U.S. have routinely topped 50,000.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi echoed those sentiments, saying Americans should look at “our friends in other countries.”
“When they had a serious lockdown, serious lockdown, ninety-some percent lockdown, they won in the fight against the virus,” the California Democrat told CNN Tuesday. “So, again, regions have to make their decisions. We should be able to give them the equipment to do so in testing, tracing, treating, et cetera. But it is a recognition that unless you have a very, very low percentage of incidence of the infection, you really have to consider locking down.”
Yet administration officials, including Dr. Fauci, have said that prolonged lockdowns are impractical at this point and have stressed personal hygiene, social distancing and mask-wearing.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report Tuesday that suggested mask-wearing is highly effective. It looked at two hairstylists in Missouri who continued to work after developing symptoms, seeing 139 customers in all before they found out they had COVID-19 and took leave.
Both the stylists and their customers wore face masks, and no symptomatic cases were reported among clients. Nearly half of those served by the stylists volunteered to get tested, and all 67 came back negative.
First lady Melania Trump tweeted out a picture of herself wearing a mask with the message: “Even in the summer months, please remember to wear face coverings & practice social distancing. The more precaution we take now can mean a healthier & safer country in the Fall.”
Mr. Trump had refused for months to wear a mask in public, but that changed over the weekend when he visited wounded veterans at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
The president insists America is on the rebound despite the coronavirus surge, pointing to the stock market and saying “people are feeling very good about our country.”
“People are feeling good about therapeutics and possible vaccines,” he said in the White House Rose Garden.
Mr. Trump also defended his decision to restrict travel from China early on and said cases are a poor metric for the pandemic, citing expansive testing that unveils infections.
He said people should focus on the death rate, which has declined sharply.
His November opponent, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, used a Tuesday speech on energy to fault the White House response, saying the pandemic “has gotten bad enough that even Donald Trump has decided to wear a mask in public.”
Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Mr. Trump should continue to wear a mask to set an example for the public amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“Clearly in their situation, they [can] easily justify they don’t need to because of all the testing around them and they know they’re not infected, but we need them … to set the example,” he said.
If everyone wore a mask, “I really do think over the next four, six, eight weeks we can bring this epidemic under control,” the director told a livestreamed event hosted by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network.
That seems to be the message across the pond, too.
French President Emmanuel Macron said residents will be required to wear masks in stores and other enclosed spaces starting Aug. 1. Mr. Macron said there’s been great progress against the virus but it is flaring up in places as the country reopens.
“We have some signs that it’s coming back a bit,” told French television.
Likewise, U.K. decided on Tuesday to mandate mask-wearing while in shops and supermarkets. People who violate the rule, which will take effect in less than two weeks, face a £100 fine, or about $125.
• Lauren Meier contributed to this report.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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