US coronavirus: Texans are seeing how dangerous Covid-19 can be as cases soar past 500,000

Texas’ case spike in July came after people let their guards down as the state reopened, Beaumont Mayor Becky Ames said in the news conference with Abbott. And rising positivity rates now could be the result of the same thing, Abbott said.

“There’s a reason why this is happening, I believe, and that is some people feel if they’re just with family members — even if it’s 50 family members — they can let their guard down,” Abbott said. “And that turns out not to be the case.”

The next reopening in the state will be for the new school year; and though local leaders will decide how and when to go back, officials have been working to provide schools with the personal protective equipment and sanitizer they need to stay safe, he said.

The country’s average number of daily new official cases was above 52,000 Tuesday — down from more than 65,000 daily in mid- to late-July, but well above a pre-surge level of about 20,000 in early June.

Average daily Covid-19 deaths have hovered above 1,000 for more than two weeks, after seven consecutive weeks below that.

Positive tests amid starts to a new school year

School buildings have been reopening across the country, even as new coronavirus cases among students and staff have been reported in places where in-person learning has resumed.

In Ohio, more than a third of students, totaling about 590,000 children, will return to full-time in-person learning, Gov. Mike DeWine said Tuesday.

But of the 101 largest school districts in the country, 63 will start the new academic year remotely.

Public schools in Elizabeth, New Jersey, had to scrap plans to return to classrooms and switch to virtual learning after more than 400 teachers notified the district that they could not return to campus due to “special considering for health-related risks.”

Students have not yet returned to school in the Broken Arrow Public School District in Oklahoma, but 33 district employees tested positive last week, Superintendent Janet Vinson said Monday, according to Tulsa World.

Meanwhile, North Paulding High School in Georgia will announce plans to reopen Wednesday after reporting several virus cases and receiving criticism over a viral photo that showed students — few wearing masks — walking in a packed school hallway.

Rely on the science and avoid the politics, Fauci says

Although practices like wearing face coverings have been politicized, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday he has learned that in order to be a good public health leader in a crisis, you have to divorce yourself from politics, rely on science and be as transparent as possible.

“Completely divorce yourself from the kind of political undertones that sometimes go into an important outbreak like this,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said as he was honored with a 2020 Citizen Leadership Award on Tuesday night by the Aspen Institute.

“You’ve got to stay away from that, lead by example, be perfectly honest and don’t be afraid to say you don’t know something when you don’t know it. I find that to be a very good formula when you’re dealing in a crisis.”

Even with the polarization, every state in the US passed at least one physical distancing measure in March to slow the spread, researchers from Harvard University and University College London said. Those measures worked, a new study found.

Physical distancing resulted in a reduction of more than 600,000 cases within just three weeks, according to the study, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS. Had there not been preventative interventions, the models suggest up to 80% of Americans would have been infected with Covid-19.

“In short, these measures work, and policy makers should use them as an arrow in their quivers to get on top of local epidemics where they are not responding to containment measures,” said the study’s co-author Dr. Mark J. Siedner in a news release

Rushing, but not racing, toward a vaccine

A vaccine against the virus is anxiously anticipated, but health experts said that the US will not rush its development — even as Russia announces its own.

“We will require any vaccine in the United States be safe and effective and meet the FDA’s gold standard,” US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said during a news conference from Taipei, Taiwan, adding that “this is not a race to be first.”

Russia claims to have approved a “world first” coronavirus vaccine, but is only in the first step of clinical trials, Azar said. And data from those trials have not been made public.

Fauci has serious doubts that Russia’s approved vaccine is safe and effective, he told Deborah Roberts of ABC News.

“We have half a dozen or more vaccines,” Fauci said. “So if we wanted to take the chance of hurting a lot of people or giving them something that doesn’t work, we could start doing this, you know, next week if we wanted to. But that’s not the way it works.”