Faced with the explosion of cases of coronavirus throughout the United States, New York was preparing to close its schools but Donald Trump, betting on the upcoming distribution of a vaccine, refused on Friday to consider the confinement of the country.
Restriction measures, like those introduced in Europe in recent weeks, seem to be having results, however, with the pandemic showing some signs of slowing down on the Old Continent.
The American city most affected by the first wave in the spring, New York has so far resisted its comeback. But the test positivity rate – long remained close to 1% – is now increasing daily and exceeded the critical threshold of 3% for the first time on Friday.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the closure at 10 p.m. of bars and restaurants from this Friday – a measure generally well accepted in a city where deconfinement has been very gradual and this type of establishment already closed for the most part before midnight .
Mayor Bill de Blasio, who reopened public schools at the end of September using a partially face-to-face model, called on parents to “prepare” for their closure on Monday.
“I think the second wave is coming (), I just hope it won’t be as bad as the first,” John Ryan, in his fifties, told AFP while waiting in front of a test center in Manhattan.
The memory of morgue trucks and tents erected in front of hospitals in March-April, with more than 23,000 deaths recorded in the metropolis, is still in everyone’s mind.
– Concern before Thanksgiving –
New York now seems like a fortress under siege, as the virus is spreading at full speed across the country.
The number of new daily cases in the United States continues to increase: it approached 189,000 between Thursday and Friday, not far from the record recorded at the beginning of the week.
And nearly 1,600 new deaths have been recorded, according to Johns Hopkins University, bringing the total in the country to more than 10.7 million cases and 244,200 deaths from Covid-19.
The number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients is also at the highest since the start of the pandemic, at more than 67,000, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
“We will have to close everything,” warned Michael Mina, epidemiologist at Harvard on Friday, during a telephone press briefing. “And if we don’t shut everything down or find something else to do, Thanksgiving is going to lead to another massive explosion of cases.”
But in his first public intervention since the announcement of his presidential defeat on Saturday – which he refuses to recognize – Donald Trump firmly ruled out this hypothesis.
“Whatever happens in the future () this administration will not impose containment,” said the Republican president. Instead, he promised that distributing the first doses of a vaccine to those at risk was “a matter of weeks.”
The announcement Monday by the Pfizer and BioNTech laboratories of promising tests for a vaccine “90% effective” against Covid-19 has raised a wave of hope.
“We will work to give them an emergency authorization, which will come extremely quickly and my administration will then be able to coordinate the distribution of the vaccine”, assured Mr. Trump.
Speaking after him, Dr Moncef Slaoui, chief medical officer of Operation Warp Speed, which coordinates the federal government’s vaccine strategy on the virus, hoped to be able to vaccinate 20 million Americans by December.
– Stabilization in Europe –
The United States remains by far the country with the heaviest toll in absolute terms, ahead of Brazil (164,737 dead), India (128,668), Mexico (97,056), and the United Kingdom (50,928 ).
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