The White House’s coronavirus task force has reduced its meetings to just one a week at a time US states across the west and Deep South are seeing a sudden jump in new cases, weeks after loosening lockdown restrictions.
More than two-thirds of the 13 states that reported more than 500 coronavirus cases on Wednesday are from the south and west, regions that began to reopen their economies early last month, according to data compiled by the Covid Tracking Project.
The seven-day average rates of new cases in California, Florida, Georgia and Texas are at or near record highs, while Arizona and Oregon have both had large jumps over the past month.
New York and New Jersey, which had been the US’s biggest pandemic hotspots and have moved more slowly to reopen their economies, have now brought their new case rate below most of those experiencing increases in the south and west.
President Donald Trump in early May publicly suggested shutting the White House coronavirus task force entirely, only to backtrack in the face of public concern he was ignoring the risks of an outbreak outside early hotspots and the possibility of a so-called second wave in the autumn.
But a review of the publicly released schedules of White House officials show the task force meetings became weekly rather than daily in the ensuing weeks, and Mr Trump has not attended one since late April.
“It is unclear what is supposed to be happening right now and who is in charge,” said one Trump administration official. “Are the agencies meant to be going it alone? Are the states? We don’t know.”
Public health experts said they were concerned the less-frequent meetings were a signal US political leaders were improperly prioritising reopening over the social distancing measures that have contained the outbreak since mid-March. Several of the states that have started loosening restrictions lack the testing capability needed to trace and isolate outbreaks as they occur.
“This is a sign that this is no longer a priority for the US government, and that is incredibly harmful,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said. “It will make fighting the pandemic much harder.”
The task force, whose members include high-profile government physicians Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, held its most recent weekly meeting on Tuesday, and has held calls this week with state governors to discuss how different parts of the country should exit lockdown.
The task force was convened at the end of January as the administration scrambled to respond to the first confirmed cases of the disease. It quickly became the main decision-making body for the federal government’s response, holding daily televised meetings often followed by high-profile press conferences.
In recent weeks, however, task force meetings have taken place behind closed doors and have not been attended by the president. Dr Fauci told CNN last week he had not seen or spoken to the president in two weeks.
Brett Giroir, a frequent attendee of the task force meetings, said last week he was leaving his role as the administration’s “coronavirus testing tsar” and would return to his previous job of focusing on the HIV epidemic at the US Department of Health and Human Services.
The White House would not comment on the task force’s meeting frequency.
The president has said he expects state governors to take the lead when it comes to deciding how and when to reopen their economies, something experts warn risks contributing to the spread of the disease. About 21,000 new cases were reported in the US on Wednesday, according to data from Covid Tracking Project — about the same rate as a month ago, when New York was still responsible for a large percentage of new cases.
“Although the states will be the ones actually implementing many interventions — including testing, isolation, contact tracing and quarantine — the federal government needs to take the lead on providing guidance and support,” said Tom Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We need a coherent national strategy and structure to effectively fight the pandemic.”
The elevated rates in some of the western and southern states may be due to more widespread testing. California is averaging about 2,600 new coronavirus cases a day, which is up nearly 50 per cent from a month ago, but it has lifted its number of tests per day over that period to nearly 60,000 from 35,000.
Florida is averaging about 1,200 new cases a day, more than double the rate a month ago when it moved its economy into the first phase of reopening. The rate of testing in the Sunshine State has nearly doubled since then to nearly 30,000 a day, but sits short of the June 15 target of 40,000 average tests per day the Florida government had set for itself.
Mr Jha warned that there were still not enough tests available to do the kind of “contact tracing” needed to isolate those exposed as lockdowns end
