Biden adviser says national lockdown is ‘measure of last resort’

A nationwide lockdown of businesses and schools is a “measure of last resort” even as cases continue to climb to record levels across the United States, a senior coronavirus adviser to President-elect Joe Biden said on Sunday.

Covid-19 cases were increasing 5% or more in 47 states on Saturday, based on a weekly average, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The United States reported 166,555 new cases on Saturday, the second highest daily number of new cases to date.

The United States is now reporting a weekly average of 145,401 cases per day, an increase of more than 33% from a week ago and a record average, according to Hopkins.

More than 69,400 people have been hospitalized with Covid-19, the highest number of patients infected with the virus at any time in the pandemic, according to data from the COVID Tracking Project, managed by reporters from The Atlantic.

Biden’s senior coronavirus advisers, who on Monday appointed a panel of scientists to help him navigate his response to Covid-19, have expressed different positions on whether the United States should adopt measures to lockout to control the recent spike in cases.

“It is a measure of last resort,” said Dr Vivek Murthy, a former US surgeon general to help lead the group, told “Fox News Sunday,” adding that any lockdown at this point in the pandemic would be different from radical closures. which states passed in the spring to suppress the virus.

“In the spring we didn’t know much about Covid, we responded, in a sense, with an on-off switch. We just stopped it because we weren’t sure exactly how it was spreading and where it was spreading, but we’ve learned a lot more since then, ”Murthy said.

Murthy’s comments come after another Biden Covid-19 adviser, Dr Michael Osterholm, who is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said Yahoo Finance in an interview Closing businesses for four to six weeks on Wednesday while paying people for lost wages could help remove cases and hospitalizations to a manageable level.

Osterholm later clarified his comments in an interview with NBC News, saying, “It wasn’t a recommendation. I never made that recommendation to Biden’s group. We never talked about it.”

A Biden transition official told NBC News that a shutdown “is not in line with the thinking of the president-elect.”

“We are not in favor of a national lockdown,” Dr Atul Gawande, professor of surgery and health policy at Harvard and adviser to Biden, told ABC “This Week” on Sunday. “You can have targeted measures based on mask wear to include generalized testing, can include up and down dial capacity restrictions, and these measures need to be applied in a more localized fashion.”

Gawande and Murthy cited New York’s “micro-cluster” strategy as an example. The state has imposed stricter restrictions on specific areas based on the level of the coronavirus spread. The hardest hit red zones would be forced to close non-essential businesses and schools for in-person learning, while other surrounding areas could remain open with changes.

“On a postcode-by-postcode basis, you can deploy different restrictions in order to control the virus and it’s pretty effective. We don’t need to do a nationwide shelter-in-place closure, ”Gawande said.

More states are starting to ease coronavirus restrictions and instituting statewide mask warrants as coronavirus cases continue to skyrocket ahead of the holidays. Many governors have pointed to “Covid fatigue,” or reduced adherence to recommended public health guidelines, as one of the reasons for the swelling of infections.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a Republican who has resisted the introduction of a mask mandate, on Friday ordered residents to begin covering their faces when in public. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine on Thursday reimposed a statewide mask mandate with tougher enforcement measures for businesses.

“If we wear a mask, we keep our kids in school and we protect our seniors and we protect our hospitals,” DeWine told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “We can see the end of it all, we just need to toughen it up … for a few more months and do whatever we need to do so that we can get through it.”