MONDAY, June 15, 2020 (HealthDay News) — With most state reopenings well underway, many are now seeing alarming surges in COVID-19 cases, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo warned that a return to lockdown for his state was possible.
“If we have a high number of violations of the [reopening] policy, which is tantamount to a high likelihood of the spread of the virus, and the local governments are not monitoring policing, doing the compliance, yes, there is a very real possibility that we would roll back the reopening in those areas,” Cuomo said Sunday at a news conference. “The only alternative would be to pause the entire reopening.”
According to CNN, 25,000 complaints have already been filed against businesses in Manhattan and elsewhere for violating the reopening plan. Violations included large gatherings, lack of social distancing, and people going without masks. Meanwhile, cases were rising in 18 states as of Saturday, with Oregon, Nevada, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Alabama, and South Carolina recording a rise of more than 50 percent in the past week as compared with the previous week, CNN noted. Texas saw a record-high 2,200 people hospitalized with COVID-19 on Saturday, and North Carolina set its own record with 823 new hospitalizations the same day.
It is not clear if all this marks a second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, said Anthony Fauci, M.D., head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “However, when you start to see increases in hospitalization, that’s a surefire situation that you’ve got to pay close attention to,” he added.
By Monday, the U.S. COVID-19 case count had passed 2 million as the death toll topped 116,000.
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