WASHINGTON | While the United States has just gone through one of its worst weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic, health officials recalled on Sunday the need to respect barrier gestures and in particular the wearing of a mask, the day after a new rally of Donald Trump where very few of his supporters had any.
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“I hear people repeat like parrots that masks don’t work […], that large gatherings do not lead to super-propagative events, ”lamented the Dre Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House coronavirus crisis unit. “They are wrong.”
“We have governors and mayors who have a number of cases equivalent to what they had during the summer, but who do not push the same policies as they did then, when they know they have changed the course of the pandemic, ”she regretted.
“It’s very disappointing,” she said, speaking of the “worst public health event” for the country.
Without openly criticizing the president, Mr.me Birx was speaking, however, the day after a campaign rally by the billionaire Republican, who traveled to the US state of Georgia on Saturday evening to campaign in a senatorial election.
The vast majority of his supporters, shoulder to shoulder in the open air listening to him, wore no masks. And the president, who has only very rarely displayed himself with this protection, barely mentioned the virus during his approximately 2 hours of speech.
The United States is yet grappling with an unprecedented outbreak of cases: for three consecutive days they have beaten the absolute record of new cases in 24 hours, with nearly 230,000 contaminations recorded between Friday and Saturday evening.
And they deplore more than 2,500 deaths in 24 hours for five days – unheard of, even at the worst of the epidemic peak of spring. More than 100,000 people sick with the coronavirus are currently hospitalized across the country, a level that had never been reached before.
“The future will be bleak for the next six weeks,” influential former head of the Drugs Agency Scott Gottlieb told CBS on Sunday. “People must protect themselves,” he added, predicting a possible death toll of 400,000 at the end of January (280,000 deaths at present).
“The next two months will most likely be as bad or worse” than the last two, former director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Tom Frieden warned on Twitter Sunday.
On Friday, the CDC recommended for the first time “universal use” of the mask, that is to say, indoors and outdoors, as soon as you leave your home.
“The United States has entered a phase of high-level transmission,” the CDC said.