Covid-19 infections are rising in 41 US states, with some southern hotspots taking crisis measures on Thursday, including calling in military medics and parking mobile morgue trucks outside hospitals, echoing scenes in New York City when it became the center of the world outbreak in the spring.
The spread of the virus has resulted in almost 56,000 hospitalizations for Covid-19 in the US currently. A month ago hospitalizations were rising in 11 states; now they are rising in 33 states.
Several states have broken records on many days in the last week as numbers rise. Florida reported a record of 156 deaths on Thursday as it became the focus of attention of the southern surge in Covid-19.
In other developments, Georgia governor Brian Kemp suspended local mask mandates on Wednesday, and early on Thursday, the Republican National Committee announced plans to scale back its national convention next month in Jacksonville, Florida, which it had moved from North Carolina before the surge of cases in Florida, hoping for fewer restrictions on crowds.
The RNC chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, confirmed the update in a letter to convention delegates, noting the organization will comply with local and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) health guidelines while adapting the events.
“We still intend to host a fantastic convention celebration in Jacksonville,” she wrote. “We can gather and put on a top-notch event that celebrates the incredible accomplishments of President Trump’s administration and his re-nomination for a second term – while also doing so in a safe and responsible manner.”
As part of the revised logistics, some events have been moved to outdoor venues while there will be smaller crowds. The entire RNC event has been capped to a total of nearly 7,000 attendees, a fraction of the typical volume. Florida has become one of the country’s fastest-growing hotspots for the coronavirus outbreak. In addition to the record deaths, the state reported nearly 14,000 new daily cases on Thursday.
The Democrats are scaling back their national convention, with the New York Times reporting on Thursday that the party is urging elected leaders and party delegates to skip the convention in August altogether. The party had already announced plans to hold a predominantly virtual convention using live broadcasts and online streaming.
Across Texas, which reported a rise to 11,000 new cases in one day, US army medics have been deployed to assist with hospital overflow and limited personnel. In the city of San Antonio, where local officials reported hospitals are now at 90% capacity, refrigerated morgue trucks have been requested to park outside hospitals.
Ken Davis, chief medical officer for Christus Health South Texas, told KSAT the bodies would be held at the hospital until they could be picked up, as “there are only so many places to put bodies”.
“It’s a hard thing to talk about,” Davis said. “People’s loved ones are dying. Our funeral homes are out of space.”
As earlier hotspots such as New York City in April found, when pressure ramps up on hospitals quickly, personal protective equipment such as masks, gloves and gowns for medical workers falls short, with some hospitals obliging staff to reuse masks and gowns that are normally disposable, ABC reported.
Deborah Burger, president of National Nurses United, the largest union for registered nurses, told ABC: “In a country that’s this rich with resources, it seems criminal that nurses and healthcare workers are having to make do with cobbled together, non-certified equipment.”
Meanwhile some Republican governors have reversed their stances against masks, enacting mandates or executive orders to require them.
On Wednesday, Alabama’s governor, Kay Ivey, said a mask order could not wait but wished that people did not “have to be ordered to do what is in your own best interest”.
But Governor Kemp of Georgia dug into his support for reopening the economy, signing an executive order on Wednesday that explicitly bans local governments from enforcing their own orders requiring masks.
The Atlanta mayor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, who recently confirmed she and her household had contracted the virus, said Donald Trump had “violate[d] law in the city” by not wearing a mask during his visit there on Wednesday.
The Trump administration faces continued backlash for its response to the outbreak. In a scathing op-ed on Thursday, Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, accused the president of downplaying the pandemic and failing to prepare Americans for its potential impact.
“So many nationwide actions could have been taken in those early days but weren’t,” he wrote. “While other countries were racing ahead with well-coordinated testing regimes, the Trump administration bungled the effort.”
Hogan clashed with Trump after circumventing White House officials to pull strings and outsource Covid-19 tests from South Korea in April when there was a shortage, saying: “It was clear that waiting around for the president to run the nation’s response was hopeless” and would “be condemning more citizens to suffering and death”.
He added that Trump had left the state more vulnerable to the virus, accusing the president of “talking and tweeting like a man more concerned about boosting the stock market or his re-election plan”.
Reopening schools has remained a point of contention, with the Trump administration pushing for in-person classes to resume even as school officials express concern. On Thursday the Dallas Independent school district became the latest major school district to reconsider reopening plans as the number of coronavirus cases swell, saying it would not reopen until at least 8 September. Earlier this week, Los Angeles and San Diego school districts announced they would remain online-only through the fall.
The White House suggested on Thursday that science should not determine whether schools reopen this fall. “The science should not stand in the way of this,” the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said at a press conference. She later added: “The science is on our side here.”
Meanwhile in Washington, the Trump administration pushed back against criticism of its decision to require that hospitals bypass the CDC’s system for reporting hospital information, opting for the Department of Health and Human Services’ reporting portal.
“HHS is committed to being transparent with the American public about the information it is collecting on the coronavirus,” a spokesman, Michael Caputo, said in response to a report from CNBC that data previously available to the public had already disappeared from CDC websites.
Maanvi Singh contributed reporting