US coronavirus: Cases surge in some states as Americans celebrate Memorial Day
Video from a pool party at Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, showed a massive crowd of people crammed together both inside and outside the pool.
An aide to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Melissa DeRosa, harshly criticized a restaurant in Patchogue that eased restrictions on mask wearing and social distancing by allowing customers to come inside to pick up food on a rainy Friday night.
“That’s stupid — stupid for you, it’s stupid for your surrounding patrons, it’s stupid for the bar,” she said Sunday at a news briefing.
The Dublin Deck Tiki Bar and Grill posted an apology on Instagram, saying, “There are no excuses when it comes to public safety. We should not have allowed anybody inside whatsoever.”
Social distancing was forgotten in Daytona Beach, Florida, on Saturday when a man apparently making a rap video threw money from atop a car into the crowd on a main thoroughfare, authorities said. Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood said officers are looking through aerial footage in an attempt to identify and arrest the man.
“Look at the numbers. You’ll see that on Thursday, more than 20,000 Americans were infected,” said Dr. Seema Yasmin, a former disease detective at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
On Friday, “that number went up, and there were more than 24,000 Americans newly diagnosed with Covid-19.”
Birx has a message for those refusing to wear masks
Wearing a face mask is critical to reducing the spread of coronavirus, especially since many carriers don’t even know they’re contagious, said Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator.
“There is clear scientific evidence now, by all the droplet experiments that happened and that others have done, to show that a mask does prevent droplets from reaching others,” Birx told “Fox News Sunday.”
She offered a message to those who say they have a right not to wear a mask in public.
In an interview with ABC, Birx said “there’s asymptomatic spread. And that means that people are spreading the virus unknowingly.”
“And this is unusual in the case of respiratory diseases,” Birx said. “So you don’t know who’s infected. And so we really want to be clear all the time that social distancing is absolutely critical. And if you can’t social distance and you’re outside, you must wear a mask.”
Several states see surges in coronavirus cases
States such as North Carolina and Arkansas are seeing major spikes, Yasmin said.
Houston mayor: ‘Too many people who are coming together’
Texas beaches also saw crowds over the weekend after bars were allowed to reopen, with restrictions.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said Sunday the city will enforce the 25% capacity rule in bars and clubs — two days after saying the rule would not be enforced. The city also will enforce the 50% rule for restraurants.
“The reality is that there are too many people who are coming together,” Turner said. “No social distancing, no mask. And then after this Memorial Day weekend is over they’re going to be on somebody’s job or in close proximity to somebody else.”
A study leads to encouraging results
There’s a bit of good news when it comes to a possible therapy for Covid-19 patients.
A study appeared to show patients who received transfusions of antibody-filled convalescent plasma seemed to fare better. Convalescent plasma is derived from the blood of recovered coronavirus patients.
“We are encouraged that our initial assessment offers evidence in support of convalescent plasma as an effective intervention,” said Dr. Nicole Bouvier, an associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a co-author on the study.
But more studies are needed to confirm the findings, the researchers said.
CNN’s Hollie Silverman, Artemis Moshtaghian, Arman Azad, Melissa Alonso, Dakin Andone, Amir Vera, Nicky Robertson, Ralph Ellis, Barbara Starr and Alec Snyder contributed to this report.
