The governors of Texas, Florida, and New Mexico are putting reopening efforts on pause amid surges in new coronavirus cases.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said efforts to reopen the state will be temporarily paused as the number of new cases spikes and hospitalization rates rise. The state has reported more than 125,900 cases as of Thursday.
“The last thing we want to do as a state is go backwards and close down businesses,” Abbott said. “This temporary pause will help our state corral the spread until we can safely enter the next phase of opening our state for business.”
Abbott also halted elective surgeries in four Texas counties seeing the highest spikes in cases and hospitalizations, in an effort to free up hospital beds. Bexar, Dallas, Harris, and Travis counties, which collectively have 56,222 confirmed coronavirus cases, must “postpone all surgeries and procedures that are not immediately, medically necessary.”
“These four counties have experienced significant increases in people being hospitalized due to COVID-19, and today’s action is a precautionary step to help ensure that the hospitals in these counties continue to have ample supply of available beds to treat COVID-19 patients,” Abbott said.
Abbott has encouraged people to wear masks but has stopped short of requiring people to wear them. He said on Monday that closing down the state a second time “will always be the last option.”
Meanwhile, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday that he will not roll back reopening measures but will not reopen the state further.
“We are where we are. I didn’t say we’re going to go on to the next phase,” DeSantis said in a press briefing. “We’ve done a step-by-step approach, and it was an approach that’s been reflective of the unique situation of each area.”
Florida, which has confirmed over 114,000 cases, is currently in phase two of reopening, which allows bars and restaurants to operate at limited capacity. The third and final phase represents a return to near-normal.
“We never anticipated necessarily doing anything different in terms of the next phase at this point,” DeSantis added.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham announced that New Mexico will not be entering phase two of its reopening, which would permit bars, theaters, and non-tribal casinos to resume operations. Coronavirus cases have increased recently in four of the state’s five regions.
Face masks are still mandatory, and occupancy limits in public places such as restaurants and salons remain in place. According to state health officials, over 11,000 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in New Mexico, and 485 people have died.
The number of new coronavirus cases reported Thursday reached a record 42,000. The total number of cases across the United States has exceeded 2.4 million, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
Four hospitals in Houston, which fall under Abbott’s temporary ban on elective surgeries, said Wednesday that they already have plenty of space to care for COVID-19 patients. CEOs of Texas Medical Center hospitals said they have plans in place to use additional beds in other areas of the hospitals to address a COVID-19 surge.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield told reporters Thursday that the number of coronavirus infections in the U.S. could be 10 times higher than reported, totaling over 20 million cases.
“Our best estimate right now is for every case reported, there were actually 10 other infections,” Redfield said.
The estimates came from serology testing, which checks for antibodies in the blood to see whether a person has had the virus but was never tested and diagnosed. Early in the pandemic, only people showing symptoms were able to receive diagnostic tests, so asymptomatic cases went undetected.
The CDC released a study Thursday showing that 31.5% of pregnant women diagnosed with the coronavirus had to be hospitalized, compared to nearly 6% of nonpregnant women. Pregnant women were also admitted to the intensive care unit at a higher rate, 1.5%, compared to nonpregnant women at 0.9%. Similarly, 0.5% of pregnant women required mechanical ventilation, compared with 0.3% of nonpregnant women.
Researchers testing a coronavirus vaccine in Britain have begun trials of the vaccine in South Africa and Brazil. The vaccine, developed at Oxford University, began its second phase last week to test over 10,000 older adults and children. But with cases of the virus dwindling in the United Kingdom, researchers worry that they will not have enough participants, so they have begun trials in Brazil and South Africa. Cases are surging in those two countries.
Trials of the vaccine will soon begin in the U.S., where cases are surging in the South and West. AstraZeneca, a pharmaceutical company that partners with Oxford, will begin enrolling 30,000 people later this month. AstraZeneca received a $1 billion investment from the federal government in May for the vaccine.
A total of $1.4 billion in coronavirus relief funding was sent to more than a million dead people in payments based on their most recent tax returns, the Government Accountability Office reported Thursday. Families are now being told they cannot cash the checks and must return them to the IRS. According to the GAO, the Treasury Department and the IRS failed to check the first three batches of payments against the death records maintained by the Social Security Administration, as is typical. The IRS also does not currently have a plan to notify ineligible recipients, including relatives of the deceased.
