Faced with the explosion of cases of coronavirus throughout the United States, New York was preparing on Saturday to close its schools. Restrictions are increasing around the world, including in Europe despite a slight improvement on the epidemic front.
On the old continent, restrictions are increasing, as in Portugal which decided on a weekend curfew, which came into force on Saturday. In Ukraine, non-essential businesses close on Saturday for three weekends. And in Austria, the government could announce Saturday a tightening of the measures already in force.
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Elsewhere in the world, the number of contaminations is increasing on all continents, except Oceania. In Lebanon, a “total” confinement of the country comes into force on Saturday in the face of this second wave which still does not ebb.
Schools closed in New York
But it is in the United States that the situation appears worrying. 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.
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. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had already announced the closure at 10 p.m. of bars and restaurants, a measure that came into force on Friday and generally well accepted in a city where deconfinement has been very gradual and where most of these establishments were already closing before midnight.
The memory of mortuary 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.
Worry before Thanksgiving
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. The number of hospitalized Covid-19 patients is also at its 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.
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“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.”
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). But with 284,000 new daily cases, Europe is still the region recording the strongest growth, even if the new contaminations now seem to have stabilized (+ 1%).
However, the authorities almost everywhere dismiss the idea of relaxing these restrictions. Despite signs of slowing down in Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel thus estimated that the epidemic would at least “occupy us all winter”.
France, one of the epicenters of the second wave, is also seeing a slowdown in contamination. But it is too “fragile” to consider lifting restrictions on December 1, the government said, while 95% of resuscitation capacities are occupied and the “peak” of this wave has not yet been reached.
In Italy, the situation is worsening in several of the 20 regions of the country. In that of Naples, in particular, hospitals were overwhelmed: patients were sometimes treated directly in their cars, while others were dying in ambulances.
In this context, the decision of the Chilean government to reopen its air borders to foreign nationals – with the hope of welcoming 300,000 tourists during the austral summer – was immediately denounced as “unwise” by the Chilean Medical Association. .
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